I like the theory of Microsoft Outlook: an all-in-one personal information manager that handles your email, calendaring, task management, contact management, and RSS news aggregation.

In practice, however, Outlook is a pain. It doesn’t fully comply with internet standards, for example, and its Windows app takes up a lot of computing resources.

Importantly, its latest version, Outlook for Windows – aka ‘Outlook (new)’ – is terrible. And after trying it for several months at work, this week I finally switched back to ‘Outlook (classic)’.

Let me list the reasons why

Now I’m someone who loves to use bleeding-edge software. I regularly try out alpha and beta releases of various apps and, as a Linux user, I’m comfortable with apps that have a little less polish (or sometimes a lot less polish) than commercial versions of the same thing.

But there were a bunch of things in ‘Outlook (new)’ that I just couldn’t deal with anymore. I even made a list.

Some functionality was missing or severely degraded compared to the older ‘Outlook (classic)’:

• You can’t open shared mailboxes

• Auto-replace text is not fully functional

• Filtering/sorting of emails is much more difficult

• Spell-check functionality is inconsistent: sometimes it only works half-way through an email and sometimes the red squiggly lines that are supposed to appear under the misspelled word don’t align with the text (the line appears in the middle of the word or it appears a line or two above the word)

The lack of compliance with internet standards is really irritating too. Especially when it comes to paragraph spacing around bullet points because that is rendered in an inconsistent manner:

• sometimes the paragraph space before/after your bullet points remains and

• sometimes it disappears when the email is read or replied-to.

The most annoying annoyances

What annoys me the most, I think, is how you keep losing focus every time you perform a basic action:

• When you press the ‘delete’ key to delete an email, focus doesn’t immediately move to the next email in the inbox. So if you press ‘delete’ again, nothing happens because no email is selected. Yes, it shows you the next email, it’s just that this email is not selected in the inbox.

• The same happens when you (click-and-drag) move an email to another folder: it shows you the next email in your original folder, but that email isn’t selected (ie in focus).

• When you unpin an email from the top of your inbox (which is the one piece of functionally I loved in the new Outlook), you lose focus on that now-unpinned email. So if you were thinking of moving this email to a folder (now that you’re done with it), you can’t do that easily. You have to scroll down through your inbox to find the email again. And because it’s no longer selected in your inbox, it’s not shaded in a different colour and so it doesn’t stand out.

These lost-focus annoyances all stem from the fact that ‘Outlook for Windows’ is basically a web app in installable-software wrapping. Meaning the kind of intuitive focus-shifting that you used to get in ‘Outlook (classic)’ you can’t replicate in the web version of the same thing. Or maybe you can and they just haven’t gotten around to it yet? Either way, this focus loss was really starting to shit me.

Happy days are here again

The upshot of all this is that I’m back to using ‘Office (classic)’ – which is basically the latest version of ‘Outlook for business’ from Office 2019 – and I haven’t been happier!

Oh, and in case you’re wondering. For my personal email, calendaring, etc on my Windows and Linux computers, I use the fantastic Mozilla Thunderbird (10/10 would recommend).