your questions, answered
Via mail, I got this question:
Are multiple exchange accounts possible in Outlook 2011?
Yes! If you’re using Exchange 2007 or 2010, you can have multiple Exchange accounts. I’ve currently got five Exchange accounts set up in my Outlook (my own account, and four that I use for usability testing purposes).
Dean asked:
I am converting from Office:Windows 2010. Do my current .pst files work on Outlook:Mac 2011? If not, how do I convert from Office:Windows to Office:Mac?
Yes! If you have a .PST file from Outlook for Windows (created using Outlook 2003 or later), you can import it into Outlook:Mac. Just transfer the .PST file from your Windows computer to your Mac (such as putting it on a thumb drive), and then go to File -> Import in Outlook:Mac.
For full instructions for how to import your .PST file into Outlook:Mac, read this help file: Import a .pst file from Outlook for Windows.
Via email, I got this kinda perplexing question:
i heard that the new excel doesn’t have pivot tables – why are you keeping macs out of business???
I’m trying to figure out where this came from, and I’m not quite sure. Excel 2008 already had pivot table support (to get started with pivot tables in Excel 2008, check out Create a pivot table report in the Excel help, and there’s a Lynda.com tutorial for it too). My only guess about this confusion is that someone might have misunderstood Walt Mossberg’s review, in which he noted that Office:Mac 2011 doesn’t have all of the features of Office 2010 for Windows, such as pivot charts in Excel.
In Excel:Mac 2011, we made a big investment in improving matters for our power users, which includes some great improvements to pivot tables. If you’re an Excel guru, check it out and tell us what you think. I think that Excel gurus will especially appreciate the performance improvements.
Via email, I got this question:
I installed Office 2011 last night. I had Safari and Firefox open, but was forced to quit them during the Office install. Why?
During the installation of Office:Mac, we install fonts. Web browsers, since they’re heavily reliant on fonts, don’t particularly like it when you change fonts out from under them while they’re running. If you install a font that the browser is using, then it’s likely to not display that font properly until you restart your browser. To avoid this kind of issue, we simply ask you to close down your browser for a couple of minutes.
On a related note, Jim asked this in the comments thread in my post about latest Office 2008 and 2004 updates:
Why does the update to Office insist that I quit Safari????
Our updater uses some of the same code as our installer, and that’s one of the pieces we reuse. We reuse that particular piece of code because an update could include font updates.
Via mail, I got this question:
I have Entourage EWS running now off Exchange Server 2010 and will be upgrading to Outlook. Do you recommend:
a) doing a fresh download of all mail and other data from the server when setting up Outlook, or
b) importing the data from Entourage into Outlook locally?
With a fresh download, you’re starting off with a clean slate. This is important for someone like me who’s been using Entourage since 2004, since gunk can build up in your database. But, with an import, you get the goodness of keeping all of your local data. Since I have been using Entourage for years, and at one point I had a teensy Exchange account size limit, I’ve got lots upon lots of local data.
With every release, I’ve gotten into the habit of starting off with a clean slate. For this release, that means that I first saved out all of my local mail (that’s the only local data that I have: all of my contacts, calendar, and so on live in Exchange). I let Outlook start off with a clean slate, download my mail from Exchange and from my IMAP accounts, and then imported the local data.
To do this, in Entourage for Web Services, I saved all my local mail folders by dragging them out of Entourage and onto my desktop. That creates .mbox files, which can then be imported into Outlook (as well as any other mail client which supports .mbox files, which is most of them). I don’t have any other local data other than mail, but I’d do the same if I did have local contacts, calendar, notes, or tasks.
Then, after Outlook had downloaded all of my Exchange and IMAP data, I made sure that it would show my local data. Go into the Preferences, then select General, and make sure that the box next to “Hide On My Computer folders” is not checked. Then, I dragged those .mbox files into Outlook.
In my opinion, that’s the best of both worlds: I start fresh and still get to keep my reams and reams of local data.
Someone emailed me to ask:
where can i buy office for mac?
Once we hit our release date of Tuesday, 26 October 2010, you’ll have plenty of options. This list is nowhere near comprehensive, and is entirely US-focused because that’s where I live and thus it’s what I know about. Commenters, feel free to add in other options.
For those of you who want to go to a bricks’n’mortar store to buy it, your friendly local Apple Store and Best Buy will have it. Other authorised Apple outlets are likely to have it too, and I’ve already seen shelf signs for it at my local Fry’s.
Online, the fine folks at Amazon are accepting pre-orders. In fact, as of this writing, it looks like they’ve got some discounts from the price for the Home and Student Edition ($10 off the single-license version and $20 off the three-license version), as well as for the Home and Business Edition ($25 off the single-license and $40 off the two-license version).
Via email, I got this question:
entourage used to sync directly with mobile devices like the palm, but replaced it in ent2008 with apple’s sync services. outlook does this too. why don’t you sync directly with mobile devices instead of doing through ical?
There’s two major reasons for supporting Sync Services instead of writing our own support: time, and being a good Apple citizen.
Today, there are dozens of mobile device manufacturers out there, and hundreds of different mobile devices. Before the introduction of Sync Services, we had to write our own support for each of those devices. There’s little commonality between the APIs that devices from different manufacturers use, so it’s a big investment in development time to support various multiple devices. Further, as devices evolve, updates to the devices require updates to sync support. Devices come out whenever they come out, which means that we had to be prepared at any time to start working on support for a new device.
The introduction of Sync Services in 10.2 offered up an opportunity for us to reduce our development costs, since we would only have to support a single sync instead of a myriad of different syncs. Additionally, it gave us the chance to continue to be a good Apple citizen. One of the major changes that Sync Services introduced is a back-end database called The Truth. Apple’s own apps write to The Truth, and other clients can also read and write to this central database too. That allows us to share our data with other clients, and to view data from other clients as well.
For more information about our Sync Services support and where we’re going from here, you can read this earlier blog post of mine: Q&A: Can I sync my Outlook:Mac 2011 calendar with Sync Services?
I saw this question on Twitter:
Anybody know if the new Outlook for Mac is scriptable? Seems to share same creator code as Entourage, but not same scripting interface…
Yes, Outlook has full support for AppleScript. AppleScript is an important part of our internal testing for our suite. We have always had great AppleScript support across the suite, and we have continually improved it in each version. Outlook continues that tradition.
If you have existing Entourage scripts, you’re going to need to update them. Outlook’s AppleScript dictionary has several differences to improve consistency and scriptability. Pretty much anything that you could script in Entourage is also scriptable in Outlook. The only places where you won’t be able to script something in Outlook that you could in Entourage are features not found in Outlook, such as newsgroup support and projects.
Speaking of twitter, you can follow me here, and there’s @officeformac too!
Perhaps in response to yesterday’s question about how to prepare for an Office 2011 install, I got the following question this morning via email:
I just installed Office 2011 last night, and noticed that there isn’t a “Remove Office” app like there was in Office 2008. How do I uninstall Office if I need to?
We made some changes to our installation process in this release, and one result is that you only need to drag your Office folder to the Trash. This is a great improvement over Office 2008, where people often simply dragged the Office folder to their trash without realising that there was a special application to do it.
I saw the following question on Twitter:
Dear lazyweb: anyone know how to send a message from a different address in Outlook Mac 2011? The From dropdown only shows my e-mail address
I’ve also got a couple of email addresses which just forward to my primary email address, and I sometimes want email to show as being sent from one of those other email addresses instead of my primary one. For example, I have an @acm.org email address which just forwards to my primary email address, and sometimes I want to send mail which comes from that @acm.org email address.
To do this, you’ll need to set up an account for this email address in Outlook. Go to the Preferences, then select Accounts. In the bottom left corner, hit the plus sign and select “Email…”. Enter in your name and the email address of this account. Under “Server information”, leave the username, password, and incoming server fields blank. Then, for your outgoing server information, enter in the details for one of your other email addresses. You might need to click on “More options” to enter more details about how to authenticate to this server (usually just the username and password for the other email server that you’re using).
Speaking of twitter, you can follow me here (but be prepared for content beyond the confines of the Office).
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