Office:Mac 2011, Outlook, Q&A

Q&A: Why doesn’t Outlook:Mac sync directly with mobile devices?

10 Comments

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?

Entourage, Office:Mac 2004, Office:Mac 2008

Office:Mac 2008 (12.2.7) and Office:Mac 2004 (11.6.1) updates available now

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Update Tuesday is here, and brings Office:Mac updates.

The latest version of Office 2008 is 12.2.7.  This update has security and stability improvements across the suite.  For Entourage users, there are improvements to Exchange support.  If you’re using Entourage for Web Services, the 12.2.7 update will update it to 13.0.7.  Full details about this update are available in the update’s Knowledge Base article.

The latest version of Office 2004 is 11.6.1.  This update has security improvements across the suite.  Full details about the update are available in its Knowledge Base article.

We also updated the Open XML File Format Converter.  It’s now at 1.1.7, and the update has security improvements too.  Its Knowledge Base article has the details.

To update, you can go to the Help menu of any Office application and then select “Check for Updates”.  Alternately, you can download directly from Mactopia.

Excel, Office:Mac 2011, Outlook, PowerPoint, Word

Office:Mac 2011 getting started videos now available

In anticipation of the upcoming October 26 launch of Office:Mac 2011, we’re updating our website with new content.  The latest update is a series of quick videos to introduce you to each of the applications.  These are all produced in-house, even down to the voiceovers: those are all MacBU employees that you hear on the videos.

Here’s links to the videos for each app:

Office:Mac 2011, Outlook, Q&A

Q&A: Is Outlook:Mac scriptable?

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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!

Office:Mac 2011, Q&A

Q&A: How do I uninstall Office:Mac 2011?

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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.

Office:Mac 2011, Outlook, Q&A

Q&A: How do I send a message from a different address in Outlook:Mac 2011?

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).

Office:Mac 2011, Q&A

Q&A: What should I do before installing Office:Mac 2011?

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Chris asked:

Just started using 2011 through volume license. Is there anything I should have done before installing?

Well, you’ve already installed, so it’s a bit late for you!  But I’ll answer this for anyone else who might be interested.

As a general rule of thumb for any kind of installation or upgrade, you should practice good computer hygiene.  Make sure that you’ve got a recent back-up.  For an Office:Mac installation or upgrade, your backup should include a copy of your Microsoft User Data folder.  This is especially important if you use Entourage, since that’s where all of your Entourage data (email, calendar events, rules, signatures, etc) is stored.

Before you install, you should make the decision about whether you want to keep the old version of Office:Mac around.  For most people, this isn’t necessary at all, although some folks like to keep the old version around just in case — the belt-and-suspenders approach to software.

Also, before you install, think about whether you actually need everything that comes with Office:Mac.  If you aren’t going to use everything, then you can use a custom installation to install only the pieces that you need.  For example, on my home computer, I always do a custom installation.  I know that my Spanish is pretty abysmal, so installing the Spanish proofing tools isn’t going to do me any good.  The proofing tools don’t take up a lot of space, but it somehow makes me feel better that I’m not spending a few MB on my hard drive for them.  I also don’t install the dock icons at home, because I launch all of my applications either automatically on start-up or via Spotlight.  Maybe it’s just that I’m picky, but I always do custom installations on my software (and the OS too!) to see if there’s anything in there that I don’t really need.

When I updated Office:Mac 2008 to Office:Mac 2011 on my laptop at home, I took the opportunity to do some clean-up.  Before upgrading, I gave my Entourage database some love: deleted a bunch of stuff, made sure that my folder structure still made sense, archived stuff that I didn’t need instant access to but still wanted to keep.  This isn’t necessary for an upgrade, but I did it because upgrade time is an excellent time to really take a look at things and figure out if there might be some cruft in there that you can get rid of.  It’s like moving into a new home.  You’re obviously taking most of your existing stuff with you, but it’s also a great chance to clean out your closet and your garage (and your study, and your CD collection, and and and … ) so that you’re not moving stuff that you don’t need any longer.

Office:Mac 2011

Macworld’s top ten features of Office:Mac 2011

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In Macworld’s continuing coverage of Office:Mac 2011, they posted their list of top ten features.  Here they are:

  1. Collaboration: In Word and PowerPoint, you can work on your document with other people at the same time.
  2. Compatibility: Aside from our usual goal of file fidelity between Office:Mac and Office for Windows, we’ve also added many features from Office for Windows.
  3. Outlook: Need I say more?
  4. Cloud: You can save to SharePoint or SkyDrive directly from Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
  5. Ribbon: A better way to access features in all of the apps (and you can completely hide it if you like).
  6. Visual Basic: We brought Visual Basic for Applications 6.5 to Office 2011, and it rocks.  (In fact, that’s a whole ‘nother blog post of my favourite test case for VBA).
  7. Template Gallery: Aside from adding some awesome new templates to Office 2011, we’ve also made it easier for you to browse the templates, modify the templates, and view your most recently-opened documents.
  8. Dynamic reordering: This was a hard feature to name, and its codename came from the demo that we first used to show it off.  Remember Waldo?  We hid Waldo on a layer, and then used dynamic reordering to show that he was in there.
  9. Excel sparklines and pivot tables: Hello power Excel users, we have some awesome new features just for you!
  10. Protection: You’ve got much more control over what other people can do with your documents and emails.  For you Outlook users who are in an Exchange environment, for example, you can disallow recipients of your mail from printing or forwarding a mail.

I’m pretty happy with this top-ten list, and not only because I worked on many of the features listed herein.

Office:Mac 2011, Outlook, Q&A

Q&A: Can I sync my Outlook:Mac calendar with Sync Services?

82 Comments

Chris asked:

Does Outlook 2011 support calendar sync to sync services like Entourage did?

You’re correct: Entourage supported contacts and calendar sync via OS X Sync Services.  Some heavy-duty users experienced recurring issues with self-duplicating items, which made for a pretty painful experience.

To avoid these issues, we rebuilt our Sync Services support from the ground up for Outlook.  We set a very high quality bar, with the goal of avoiding those issues that our Entourage users faced.  For our initial v14.0.0 release, we got there with contacts.  But we didn’t get there with calendar.  Close, but no cigar.  Close wasn’t good enough, so we held off.  We wanted Outlook to be the most awesome Outlook ever.  We decided that we’d rather not support it on the initial release rather than have a version that didn’t meet our standards.

We will add calendar sync in a future update.  I don’t have a date to share yet for that.  The team is working hard on it, and I’ll post when it’s ready.

Exchange, Office:Mac 2011, Outlook

Macworld’s review of Outlook:Mac 2011

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On Friday, Macworld published John Welch‘s review of Outlook:Mac 2011.  It’s a big review, but then there’s quite a lot to say about an all-new application, and John’s never been anything short of verbose anyway.  John’s a hard guy to please, so I feel like our four mice in his review would’ve been at least 4.5 mice in anyone else’s review!  His final advice is that “[i]f you need an Exchange client on the Mac, Outlook 2011 is the king … or just want something more than Mail, iCal, and Address Book give you, Outlook is a no-brainer”

Since it’s such a big review, there’s discussion of some of the subtle work that we’ve done to improve your experience when you’re using Outlook.  For example, he noticed one of my favourite features in the calendar.  If you select a specific category in the list on the left side, the events that are in the other categories fade out a little bit.  It’s subtle, but it’s a great visual indicator to help you focus on the category that you’ve selected.

John also talks about our Ribbon.  Here’s part of what he has to say:

The Ribbon is a bit of a controversy. It’s a user interface element in all of the Office programs that sits at the top of the document window and provides quick access to the most commonly used tools. At first, because of my experience with Entourage, I hated it. I like to have a minimal UI. After using it for a while, I’ve changed my opinion. The Ribbon is a bit garish, but it does keep the options I use frequently right where I need them. It doesn’t get in the way and it takes up a minimal amount of space.

If I had any complaints about the review, I have to admit that I find it perplexing that Outlook’s use of Exchange Web Services (and thus the requirement that it requires Exchange 2007 or later) gets three separate lines in the “cons” section at the top of the review.

a Macintosh girl in a Microsoft world

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