Lookout, Office 2003 Delivers

For months, I've been drooling over the new features in Outlook 2003, patiently waiting for better Rules handling, improved Find, and a new layout that makes better use of my screen real estate.

I've started using Outlook 2003 full time on Monday afternoon. Aside from a couple minor quirks, all my expectations have been met, and then some.

The new layout, with preview pane to the left of the mail list, makes reading full messages without opening them a reality. In a few instances, HTML mail wraps itself oddly in this configuration, requiring the mail to be opened for full reading, but in general, I can read virtually every message I receive, without actually opening the message.

Built-in image blocking is a nice addition to Outlook. If every mail app had this feature, spammers would have a more difficult time verifying valid addresses. If you've been looking for a reason to upgrade from Outlook 2000 or XP, this one feature might be worth the investment.

Find is vastly improved. It works almost as well as the comparable feature in the Microsoft Mac product Entourage. I finally feel like I'm not wading through a sea of junk when I'm looking for past messages.

Rules are now incredibly easy to set up. All my old rules upgraded without issue and creating new rules is many steps less complicated than previous versions of Outlook. For that matter, adding contacts and calendar items based on incoming messages seems to function much better too.

The quirks I don't like? You can no longer simply uncheck a box to prevent Outlook from including a particular mail account in a Send/Receive operation; you now have to ungroup it from your other mail accounts. At some point, I may discover an advantage to this, in the meantime, it was a PITA during a recent server move. The other annoyance is shifting the Send/Receive shortcut fro F5, where it's been forever, down to F9. Despite having Outlook auto-check for new mail every 5 minutes, there are still times when I want to hit the button to do it manually.

Posted by Jake

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Lookout, Office 2003 Delivers

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