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Ok I have some gripes. I work at a facility with 6,000 users. I do IT. I do support for 1,300 Macs of various makes and models. Excel, Powerpoint, and Word have crap user interfaces. This is in-line with the Office 2007 "ribbon idea" on the whole. People who use Macs hate it; and people who are Windows converts like it. Too many damn buttons vs. endless complexity. Second, Outlook is not a savior for this platform at all. Try and move a message from one mail folder to the other. You'll get a "search box" where you MUST TYPE IN the exact damn folder you wish to place that email in. ONE AT AT TIME. Conversation mode doesn't group relevant emails together at all. Outlook just groups emails together that seemingly have NOTHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER and calls them a conversation for whatever damn reason. Outlook still can't import PST contact groups, or calendars at all. It does not sync with iCal at all in any fashion, and to boot does not have any way to change calendaring labeling schemes en-masse. What do I mean? All your events are labeled "No label" when you start it up and have to tediously label items or dump them in some bucket for you to be able to discern events from OTHER PEOPLE'S ##$%$@# EVENTS. In short: A BUNDLE OF ENTRIES ON A CALENDAR THAT HAVE NO LABELS OR COLOR SCHEMA AT ALL BY DEFAULT. GREAT JOB MS! REALLY!

I've spent more time at work explaining how this POS email client works to people new to Macs expecting things to transfer over properly using PST files and they don't. They just don't. PST file conversions can fail, and what's worse they botch other items (cal/contacts).

I've been messing around with this product since April of this year and it is trash. Avoid Outlook; and I'd go one further and say just avoid Office if you don't want nightmares in user land. I'd give Word, Excel, and Powerpoint a collective 56% rating. Outlook I'd give a -57% rating.

Again, the only reason people use these tools is b/c of monopolistic practices held through the 1990s to now. And it only has meant worse products, worse UI design, worse cross platform compatibility, and bitter angst between two groups of people.

If you have a choice to stay away, or save money, please do. You're better off using *anything* other than this pay-to-eat-crap software set.

Google Docs, iWork, OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice, StarOffice, Scrivener, OR A PENCIL + PAPER + YOUR FEET TO DELIVER THE MESSAGE might be better! You'll lose some fat doing it!

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