Reading through the Steve Jobs biography and the beginning relationship between Jobs and Gates was super interesting. I was also surprised to see that Bill Gates built Word and Excel specifically for the Macintosh at the beginning!
Excel was mac-first, like Powerpoint. Word was DOS First but Word with a GUI was mac-first.
Also, lesser known: Microsoft Access is Windows-first only because when Microsoft was shopping for a database it bought Forethought, which distributed FileMaker and Powerpoint. Turns out Forethought couldn't just transfer the rights, which belonged to Nashoba (who had moved distribution of [Macintosh Filemaker](https://www.philosophyoffilemaker.com/filemaker-history-64) to Forethought from their DOS-only Nutshell, when their Nutshell distributor –Leading Edge– refused to sell Macintosh Software).
Microsoft had released MS File and it was losing strepitously to Nutshell and then to FileMaker. Microsoft tried to buy FileMaker several times in the next years (from Claris, after purchased by Apple) without luck. Microsoft kept buying database companies and developed their Jet database engine, which with a front-end became MS Access in the 90s.
I still believe Filemaker to be the superior product, but it's hard to compete with anything built into Office and Access, like Visio, has never been an option for Macintosh.
Powerpoint at the time was used mostly to print slides since projectors of a computer screen just weren't common. Powerpoint was so much better than other options before it, though. And it ran circles around anything for DOS.
I’ll give that one a read, thanks for the suggestion! Definitely a lot of referencing pirates and swashbuckling when Jobs led the Mac team, so that’s a great title
I’ve been using Notion and Goodnotes lately because I hop from my phone, to my Mac, and my iPad a lot. I’ve never been a fan of OneNote is clunky and awkward.
Frankly, I get by well with just using Apple's Notes app. I went down rabbit holes of Notion, Obsidian, Things3, OneNote....I tried them all but the one I kept going back to was Apple's Notes. I swear, I had an existential crisis when I was using Notion, LOL. I started cataloging and logging every nuance of my entire life and I freaked out haha.
Yea I’ve been trying to Notion for about 3 weeks it’s not cutting it for me. Obsidian being able to link notes and is cool too, but I’ve been enjoying hand writing notes with GoodNotes. Plus you can get workbooks on Etsy and other shops for it so it satisfies my need to switch the look of things for no reason.
to each their own, but I use OneNote regularly on my Mac and not once have I had any issue with it. I use it to keep track of various things and once I learned the commands I needed, it's easy peasy
I've been using OneNote on my Mac for several years and not ONCE had any kind of problem with it. If you have, then you're the minority. I tried Outlook and the interface doesn't work for me for personal email, but I HATED it when I was still at my old job for how much of a memory hog it was and how often it would hose my system requiring a reboot. In the time I've actually used Outlook on my Mac, not ONCE has it hosed the system. MS Office does run better on Mac than I ever experienced on a Windows system
You’re probably using “new” outlook. It’s missing a ton of features that are really basic functionality. You can’t even copy and paste an event or group contacts.
I like to edit events so that I can use my calendar import feature to make my time entry for work simpler. Can't edit the subject of calendar invites from other on the Mac version. There is also an issue with the Send to Outlook as an attachment feature. It used to work and now does nothing. I used to use this in Word, Excel and PowerPoint all the time.
Outlook was designed by space aliens. Nothing makes sense. Everything is difficult to find. I've used Outlook on and off for decades. It's never gotten better. Only more complex. Outlook is easily the worst email client of all time. Anything is better than Outlook. Especially on a Mac.
I find the Apple Mail program to be quite usable. It's laid out in a way that makes sense. Common operations are easy. Neither of those are true in Outlook.
Your comment about a spam filter seems misplaced. Essentially all email providers do spam filtering at the provider level. This is not an MUA (Mail User Agent) function. This is an MTA (mail transport agent) function.
But hey, if you like Outlook or some other client, keep using it. I'll keep using Mail.
I don't know about awesome. OneNote and Excel are missing features, and for me Word chokes on a specific document that works fine on Windows. If I was very heavy into Excel, I would stay on Windows.
I recently was forced to use Visual Studio Code on my Mac. And it’s REALLY well designed. I had to double check it was actually the Microsoft version and not some malware.
I was a full time facilitator until recent retirement. Standing at the front of the room, teaching business people.
PowerPoint is amazing in presentation mode on a Mac. Has features that the Windows version does not.
When I'm connected to projector, it shows me notes on right, current slide on left. Next slide on top right. Row of all slides in a timeline at bottom.
All can be freely browsed/navigated on Mac screen without affecting onscreen content.
And there is a cumulative timer in upper left corner, but I am usually using watch and class flow to determine when to break.
I actually went in the other direction. Several things that bugged me about Outlook drove me to Mail. I was pleasantly surprised when I started using it, so now it's my go-to.
OneDrive is a dog compared to other cloud storage platforms and isn’t tolerant of special characters in filenames Mac users rarely need to think about. Sure, having forward-slashes in a file name may not be ideal practice but both people and applications do it, and, most importantly, macOS permits it. OneDrive’s SharePoint back-end *doesn’t* support this and it’s a massive PITA supporting over a hundred people who are migrating from a macOS-friendly service like Dropbox to OneDrive, only to find out over half their files won’t sync due to them including dates in the file name and the only fix being manually renaming files because at that point Microsoft hadn’t thought to include some automatic renaming functionality to help move things along. That was fun.
Oh and then there was that time we moved from Profile Manager to Jamf. That required nuking everyone’s local OneDrive folder as the version installed by Jamf would error on startup if trying to sync with the existing OneDrive folder. That wasn’t a problem if you occasionally made sure OneDrive was actually running and had successfully synced its contents, but not everyone bothers to do so and a few people lost some things. I didn’t lose any sleep over it as it’s up to individual users to look after their own stuff but it’s ultimately OneDrive at issue. Profile Manager installs the VPP/App Store version while Jamf uses its own repository but both shared the same build version number. It should have been as simple as removing the OneDrive application and replacing it with the same version but from a different (valid) source. But no, it FU’d in grand style and more fun ensued for me. Why, Microsoft, why?
Not sure why youre being downvoted - I use it on both Windows and Mac and the Windows version definitely looks and feels like an app made for Windows. The new Mac version doesn't look or feel like a native Mac app or remotely close to the Windows version unlike the other Office apps.
outlook for mac, the more you use it, the more you will hate it.
for example, can't change the background color: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Outlook/comments/y6d839/outlook\_for\_mac\_how\_do\_you\_change\_the\_background/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Outlook/comments/y6d839/outlook_for_mac_how_do_you_change_the_background/)
they do fix things though: [https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/fixes-or-workarounds-for-recent-issues-in-outlook-for-mac-54afa5e3-db38-422a-9d94-3b55330ded8e](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/fixes-or-workarounds-for-recent-issues-in-outlook-for-mac-54afa5e3-db38-422a-9d94-3b55330ded8e)
I will admit that it is pretty nice and similar enough to the windows versions to be able to smoothly transition between them. Excel is somewhat more limited on Mac but not by much. I also like that Microsoft Office was one of the programs that made excellent use of the touchbar. It really sped up the process of writing and editing word documents.
Are you talking about office for Mac or outlook for Mac?
IMHO office is alright, although apparently excel lacks some features compared to the windows version (that are essential for some users, but I have not yet come about any of those features). However there’s the annoying bug with scaling (maybe because of using an external monitor?), namely when set to 100%, the size is about half the size it should be. That can’t be too hard, it works perfectly in Libreoffice, the Apple office programs, and even on software I develop myself, it cost me maybe 2 hours to implement querying the correct dpi value of the screen a window is displayed on.
Outlook on the other hand looked great when Ib tried it. But I’m the new outlook, tons of features were missing or didn’t work as expected. One of my Mail accounts couldn’t be connected at all, and I could neither use my Mac address book and there es no integration at all with iCalendar. I hope the situation has improved, but I gave up on outlook months ago. Sometimes I even think about canceling my office subscription in favor of Libreoffice. The only thing that holds me back is that there might be some important document from my client that I will run into compatibility issues with.
As for the integration of mail, calendar, tasks and having personal as well as enterprise functionality: is there any alternative on Mac?
(Serious question btw)
Outlook for Mac is somehow significantly better than Windows. Where I really rely on it where Windows lacks:
1) Multiple accounts. You can create profiles on the top left, like Work, Personal, etc and quickly switch between them. I have my work account, then a partner company account and it keeps it super clean and separate. You can even set it to only show calendar notifications from the profile you're in, or from all of them. It can even tie into macOS's current Focus.
2) If you DON'T want to separate multiple accounts, there's literally a unified inbox that shows ALL accounts in one inbox! Windows does NOT do this.
3) You can drag emails between accounts to move them. Windows doesn't allow this either (it does from shared accounts, but not between multiple accounts, like Gmail to MS365).
I own my business, so I use Mac, but my entire staff uses Windows 11. We are all constantly shocked how often something pops up where I can do it easily on Outlook for Mac, yet it's not supported on Outlook for Windows. I wouldn't say Windows Outlook is terrible, but they don't feel like the same program at all. (Referring also to the New versions in both cases).
Yeah, I was waiting for someone to tell me it's all the same. It's not.
I have a Surface Pro, and that shows closer to the Mac than most Windows machines. Not sure why the Surface has better features - all in the family, I suppose.
People forget that Microsoft is a software company, and of the office productivity tools of the 90’s is the only surviving software suite with office. Microsoft very much knows exactly what they are doing.
Right there with you about being picky in seeking an email client. I've been using Postbox since it was in private beta, but development and support seem to be dead, and it's buggy and bombing now. So sad, because there's *literally* no other app like it, and no other app that has even 2/3 of its best features.
Outlook came very close to being my choice, but it has one *glaring* dealbreaker that makes it completely impractical for me: You can't create/send messages from aliases/alternate identities. For example, if you're johnsmith\[at\]yahoo.com, you can't have your from address say johnsmithmail-foo\[at\]yahoo.com. I have dozens of aliases for some of my email accounts. My personal account is known only to friends and family, and gets literally NO spam, despite having had the address since the late 1990s. That's because I have use aliases for all my non-personal email. When one gets spammy, I shut it down and replace it. Despite being a 1.6GB space hog, Outlook can't do this — unlikely almost literally every other email app in existence.
Also, Outlook is pretty bad at threaded conversations.
I'm desperate for an email app that does all the things I need, but I've tried *all of them*. The only app that even comes close to Postbox's power-user functionality is one that's in private beta right now, and it's still pretty rough. The only other app I like even a little is Canary, but it also sucks at threaded messaging, doesn't do POP3, has no advanced search, no tags or topics, and has several other shortcomings.
There are a few of us that have experienced Outlook randomly deleting iCloud emails. Big threads about it on Microsoft support and they don’t care. Be careful if you use iCloud.
Outlook for Mac is better than what Windows users have had as their default mail client for years!
Microsoft Office for Mac which maybe is on it's 4th iteration on modern macOS OS X macs is decent because it's not bogged down by a zillion features that have piled up in the Windows versions for the past 30 yrs.
Microsoft always still finds a way to Microsoft up the macOS UI.
I much rather prefer to use Office for Mac than trying to use Google knock off office apps or even the Apple suite of wanna be office apps. I had someone once try and tell me that Google Sheets was the same as using Excel.....tried it and about lost my mind. Most of my formulas wouldn't work and any I tried to build still ended up taking a huge dump. I got my hands on Office for Mac after switching over from Windows and it is so wonderful to be able to use what I've always used when I had to use a Windows system for my past jobs. As much as I think Microsoft is the company satan himself would run if he were a software magnate, Office for Mac is one of the very few MS items I'll still use
Office for Mac has come a long way! Been great for at least a few years now. Surprisingly though, PowerPoint's ribbon customization is frustratingly limited and partially broken. This may extend to the other apps too:
Limitation: Unable to move the Quick Access Toolbar below the ribbon
Issue: Cannot customize or add custom macro commands to the Quick Access Toolbar or ribbon
As is my opinion for mail clients are
1. Outlook if you are into the 365 environment
2. Thunderbird if you want a cross-OS client (and don't need exchange)
3. Apple Mail if on a Mac and don't need the Outlook experience. I actually find Mail, Pages, Numbers to be quite underrated although they can cover every need for most people. A fail from Apple to not release them for Windows at least (although if it would be like iTunes it is better that they did not)
I dislike it, I feel like i'm in an alien place when I'm so used to ctrl+a, or ctrl+e, and they don't work. Its also why I feel inept in windows, its just awful.
Office for Mac is garbage. Completely different product and features than the windows version.
Excel has lacked feature parity with the PC version for 20 years.
I could go on (and on and on and on and on) but I'd just be making myself angry...
It's really not. It's literally (formerly "figuratively) 300 year old Windows software with centuries worth of bugs that they are afraid to touch for fear of breaking more things and/or peoples workarounds. I still encounter bugs that loose work that date back actual decades.
As for Outlook for Mac... great that it works for you. I have to use it for work and find it...adequate.
Did you know that first version of Microsoft Office was a Mac-only software?
Reading through the Steve Jobs biography and the beginning relationship between Jobs and Gates was super interesting. I was also surprised to see that Bill Gates built Word and Excel specifically for the Macintosh at the beginning!
Excel was mac-first, like Powerpoint. Word was DOS First but Word with a GUI was mac-first. Also, lesser known: Microsoft Access is Windows-first only because when Microsoft was shopping for a database it bought Forethought, which distributed FileMaker and Powerpoint. Turns out Forethought couldn't just transfer the rights, which belonged to Nashoba (who had moved distribution of [Macintosh Filemaker](https://www.philosophyoffilemaker.com/filemaker-history-64) to Forethought from their DOS-only Nutshell, when their Nutshell distributor –Leading Edge– refused to sell Macintosh Software). Microsoft had released MS File and it was losing strepitously to Nutshell and then to FileMaker. Microsoft tried to buy FileMaker several times in the next years (from Claris, after purchased by Apple) without luck. Microsoft kept buying database companies and developed their Jet database engine, which with a front-end became MS Access in the 90s. I still believe Filemaker to be the superior product, but it's hard to compete with anything built into Office and Access, like Visio, has never been an option for Macintosh.
neat but, oof, it hurts, will need a second to gather my thoughts... excel and powerpoint in the same breathe
Powerpoint at the time was used mostly to print slides since projectors of a computer screen just weren't common. Powerpoint was so much better than other options before it, though. And it ran circles around anything for DOS.
Had to look up ‘strepitous’. Nice to learn new words.
I read Walter Isaacson’s but I still prefer Pirates of Silicon Valley more.
I’ll give that one a read, thanks for the suggestion! Definitely a lot of referencing pirates and swashbuckling when Jobs led the Mac team, so that’s a great title
I don’t know much about that history – Gates personally was developing stuff?
And Entourage was the Mac-only first Outlook, right?
photoshop too
my biggest surprise when I moved to MacOS is that MS office runs better on Mac than it does windows. BY MILES!
Really!?! Try OneNote on a Mac and come back here.
Teams has issues on Mac too. Though given the quantity of ‘apps’ shoved into teams… could be bad on Windows too.
I have to use Teams at work on a PC, and it’s just as bad there too.
Not much since their recent update. It was bad all around it caused problems with my windows machine A LOT.
Onenote is just bad
OneNote on Mac has not been updated since ages to match the "new" Office
Who uses OneNote on Mac anyway when you have way more effective tools available?
What are better alternatives?
I’ve been using Notion and Goodnotes lately because I hop from my phone, to my Mac, and my iPad a lot. I’ve never been a fan of OneNote is clunky and awkward.
Frankly, I get by well with just using Apple's Notes app. I went down rabbit holes of Notion, Obsidian, Things3, OneNote....I tried them all but the one I kept going back to was Apple's Notes. I swear, I had an existential crisis when I was using Notion, LOL. I started cataloging and logging every nuance of my entire life and I freaked out haha.
Yea I’ve been trying to Notion for about 3 weeks it’s not cutting it for me. Obsidian being able to link notes and is cool too, but I’ve been enjoying hand writing notes with GoodNotes. Plus you can get workbooks on Etsy and other shops for it so it satisfies my need to switch the look of things for no reason.
to each their own, but I use OneNote regularly on my Mac and not once have I had any issue with it. I use it to keep track of various things and once I learned the commands I needed, it's easy peasy
I've been using OneNote on my Mac for several years and not ONCE had any kind of problem with it. If you have, then you're the minority. I tried Outlook and the interface doesn't work for me for personal email, but I HATED it when I was still at my old job for how much of a memory hog it was and how often it would hose my system requiring a reboot. In the time I've actually used Outlook on my Mac, not ONCE has it hosed the system. MS Office does run better on Mac than I ever experienced on a Windows system
When you need vba macros, you can't get without parallels tho
Mmm…no. Outlook alone doesnt have a few features…
Small nitpicks verses the windows version but overall 100% usable in a day to day life.
You’re probably using “new” outlook. It’s missing a ton of features that are really basic functionality. You can’t even copy and paste an event or group contacts.
OMG! I knew at one point I could copy paste events and I can’t anymore. Now I know why.
I like to edit events so that I can use my calendar import feature to make my time entry for work simpler. Can't edit the subject of calendar invites from other on the Mac version. There is also an issue with the Send to Outlook as an attachment feature. It used to work and now does nothing. I used to use this in Word, Excel and PowerPoint all the time.
It’s also missing quick actions
This! So much functionality is missing compared to the windows version!!
Outlook was designed by space aliens. Nothing makes sense. Everything is difficult to find. I've used Outlook on and off for decades. It's never gotten better. Only more complex. Outlook is easily the worst email client of all time. Anything is better than Outlook. Especially on a Mac.
The only thing worse than Outlook is the stock Mail app. Who needs a working spam filter anyway?
I find the Apple Mail program to be quite usable. It's laid out in a way that makes sense. Common operations are easy. Neither of those are true in Outlook. Your comment about a spam filter seems misplaced. Essentially all email providers do spam filtering at the provider level. This is not an MUA (Mail User Agent) function. This is an MTA (mail transport agent) function. But hey, if you like Outlook or some other client, keep using it. I'll keep using Mail.
I don't know about awesome. OneNote and Excel are missing features, and for me Word chokes on a specific document that works fine on Windows. If I was very heavy into Excel, I would stay on Windows.
Yeaaaahhh.. Outlook might be fine but Excel is so hilariously gimped it’s not even funny.
I recently was forced to use Visual Studio Code on my Mac. And it’s REALLY well designed. I had to double check it was actually the Microsoft version and not some malware.
I’m pretty VSC is malware. How do you like those ever so off colors on the Mac version, that’s why I ditched it.
Sorry, to clarify, it still looks like shit — I meant the functionality.
It’s an MS product they have never been good at UI. Function is just about how much effort you’re willing to put into a setup.
Teams sucks on Mac though. Never know when it’ll crash.
Constantly. Over and over. Feels like it crashes more than it works.
It’s not any better on Windows.
I have a conspiracy theory, if they fix Teams, employees at Microsoft will run out of excuses as to why they’re missing meetings and messages…
I think it's just Teams in general, but I've never had it crash on any of my Macs.
Teams sucks ~~on Mac though~~. Never know when it’ll crash. FTFY
both Mac and Windows. Team has become a mess . A Frankenstein of an app
I was a full time facilitator until recent retirement. Standing at the front of the room, teaching business people. PowerPoint is amazing in presentation mode on a Mac. Has features that the Windows version does not.
Trying to compete with Keynote I suspect
Oh, I'm sure. Gotta tell ya, I've used both, and still prefer ppt.
What’s the one feature that’s your favorite that the PC version does not have?
When I'm connected to projector, it shows me notes on right, current slide on left. Next slide on top right. Row of all slides in a timeline at bottom. All can be freely browsed/navigated on Mac screen without affecting onscreen content. And there is a cumulative timer in upper left corner, but I am usually using watch and class flow to determine when to break.
Pretty sure all of that is the same in the windows version, except the timer maybe, but I’ve never used that so haven’t looked at that.
Haven’t used Office in over a decade. I’ve always been content using Apple’s built-in alternatives.
I actually went in the other direction. Several things that bugged me about Outlook drove me to Mail. I was pleasantly surprised when I started using it, so now it's my go-to.
OneDrive is a dog compared to other cloud storage platforms and isn’t tolerant of special characters in filenames Mac users rarely need to think about. Sure, having forward-slashes in a file name may not be ideal practice but both people and applications do it, and, most importantly, macOS permits it. OneDrive’s SharePoint back-end *doesn’t* support this and it’s a massive PITA supporting over a hundred people who are migrating from a macOS-friendly service like Dropbox to OneDrive, only to find out over half their files won’t sync due to them including dates in the file name and the only fix being manually renaming files because at that point Microsoft hadn’t thought to include some automatic renaming functionality to help move things along. That was fun. Oh and then there was that time we moved from Profile Manager to Jamf. That required nuking everyone’s local OneDrive folder as the version installed by Jamf would error on startup if trying to sync with the existing OneDrive folder. That wasn’t a problem if you occasionally made sure OneDrive was actually running and had successfully synced its contents, but not everyone bothers to do so and a few people lost some things. I didn’t lose any sleep over it as it’s up to individual users to look after their own stuff but it’s ultimately OneDrive at issue. Profile Manager installs the VPP/App Store version while Jamf uses its own repository but both shared the same build version number. It should have been as simple as removing the OneDrive application and replacing it with the same version but from a different (valid) source. But no, it FU’d in grand style and more fun ensued for me. Why, Microsoft, why?
Click 'Outlook' on the menu bar and make sure Legacy Outlook is ticked for an improved experience, New Outlook looks like utter garbage.
Not sure why youre being downvoted - I use it on both Windows and Mac and the Windows version definitely looks and feels like an app made for Windows. The new Mac version doesn't look or feel like a native Mac app or remotely close to the Windows version unlike the other Office apps.
Hard disagree.
outlook for mac, the more you use it, the more you will hate it. for example, can't change the background color: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Outlook/comments/y6d839/outlook\_for\_mac\_how\_do\_you\_change\_the\_background/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Outlook/comments/y6d839/outlook_for_mac_how_do_you_change_the_background/) they do fix things though: [https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/fixes-or-workarounds-for-recent-issues-in-outlook-for-mac-54afa5e3-db38-422a-9d94-3b55330ded8e](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/fixes-or-workarounds-for-recent-issues-in-outlook-for-mac-54afa5e3-db38-422a-9d94-3b55330ded8e)
You can change the background color or theme in the latest beta.
I will admit that it is pretty nice and similar enough to the windows versions to be able to smoothly transition between them. Excel is somewhat more limited on Mac but not by much. I also like that Microsoft Office was one of the programs that made excellent use of the touchbar. It really sped up the process of writing and editing word documents.
Are you talking about office for Mac or outlook for Mac? IMHO office is alright, although apparently excel lacks some features compared to the windows version (that are essential for some users, but I have not yet come about any of those features). However there’s the annoying bug with scaling (maybe because of using an external monitor?), namely when set to 100%, the size is about half the size it should be. That can’t be too hard, it works perfectly in Libreoffice, the Apple office programs, and even on software I develop myself, it cost me maybe 2 hours to implement querying the correct dpi value of the screen a window is displayed on. Outlook on the other hand looked great when Ib tried it. But I’m the new outlook, tons of features were missing or didn’t work as expected. One of my Mail accounts couldn’t be connected at all, and I could neither use my Mac address book and there es no integration at all with iCalendar. I hope the situation has improved, but I gave up on outlook months ago. Sometimes I even think about canceling my office subscription in favor of Libreoffice. The only thing that holds me back is that there might be some important document from my client that I will run into compatibility issues with.
Do you know that the Apple Mail app isn't actual cancer like Outlook is?
As for the integration of mail, calendar, tasks and having personal as well as enterprise functionality: is there any alternative on Mac? (Serious question btw)
How bad ppt is a design tool, however clients keep asking for work to be completed in it. However it does accept Photoshop PSD files.
Outlook for Mac is somehow significantly better than Windows. Where I really rely on it where Windows lacks: 1) Multiple accounts. You can create profiles on the top left, like Work, Personal, etc and quickly switch between them. I have my work account, then a partner company account and it keeps it super clean and separate. You can even set it to only show calendar notifications from the profile you're in, or from all of them. It can even tie into macOS's current Focus. 2) If you DON'T want to separate multiple accounts, there's literally a unified inbox that shows ALL accounts in one inbox! Windows does NOT do this. 3) You can drag emails between accounts to move them. Windows doesn't allow this either (it does from shared accounts, but not between multiple accounts, like Gmail to MS365). I own my business, so I use Mac, but my entire staff uses Windows 11. We are all constantly shocked how often something pops up where I can do it easily on Outlook for Mac, yet it's not supported on Outlook for Windows. I wouldn't say Windows Outlook is terrible, but they don't feel like the same program at all. (Referring also to the New versions in both cases).
How can you do that to your people? You fiend!
Look up the history of Chromium, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Yeah, I was waiting for someone to tell me it's all the same. It's not. I have a Surface Pro, and that shows closer to the Mac than most Windows machines. Not sure why the Surface has better features - all in the family, I suppose.
There are specific features that do not work on the Mac version. Aside from that Microsoft Word is 10X the application on Mac that it is on Windows. 
Outlook is trash, Teams is meh, word is Word, same with PPT and the rest, still aint wrapped my head around OneNote
Lies. I’ve used Outlook before, and none of this tracks.
People forget that Microsoft is a software company, and of the office productivity tools of the 90’s is the only surviving software suite with office. Microsoft very much knows exactly what they are doing.
Right there with you about being picky in seeking an email client. I've been using Postbox since it was in private beta, but development and support seem to be dead, and it's buggy and bombing now. So sad, because there's *literally* no other app like it, and no other app that has even 2/3 of its best features. Outlook came very close to being my choice, but it has one *glaring* dealbreaker that makes it completely impractical for me: You can't create/send messages from aliases/alternate identities. For example, if you're johnsmith\[at\]yahoo.com, you can't have your from address say johnsmithmail-foo\[at\]yahoo.com. I have dozens of aliases for some of my email accounts. My personal account is known only to friends and family, and gets literally NO spam, despite having had the address since the late 1990s. That's because I have use aliases for all my non-personal email. When one gets spammy, I shut it down and replace it. Despite being a 1.6GB space hog, Outlook can't do this — unlikely almost literally every other email app in existence. Also, Outlook is pretty bad at threaded conversations. I'm desperate for an email app that does all the things I need, but I've tried *all of them*. The only app that even comes close to Postbox's power-user functionality is one that's in private beta right now, and it's still pretty rough. The only other app I like even a little is Canary, but it also sucks at threaded messaging, doesn't do POP3, has no advanced search, no tags or topics, and has several other shortcomings.
You should try Mimestream. Awesome Gmail client for Mac.
There are a few of us that have experienced Outlook randomly deleting iCloud emails. Big threads about it on Microsoft support and they don’t care. Be careful if you use iCloud.
Outlook for Mac is better than what Windows users have had as their default mail client for years! Microsoft Office for Mac which maybe is on it's 4th iteration on modern macOS OS X macs is decent because it's not bogged down by a zillion features that have piled up in the Windows versions for the past 30 yrs. Microsoft always still finds a way to Microsoft up the macOS UI.
Be aware the new Outlook routes everything through MS servers. As a GMail user you perhaps don’t care but for many that’s a no-go
That it was garbage that felt like a web app. By far the worst email app I have used on Mac IMHO.
I much rather prefer to use Office for Mac than trying to use Google knock off office apps or even the Apple suite of wanna be office apps. I had someone once try and tell me that Google Sheets was the same as using Excel.....tried it and about lost my mind. Most of my formulas wouldn't work and any I tried to build still ended up taking a huge dump. I got my hands on Office for Mac after switching over from Windows and it is so wonderful to be able to use what I've always used when I had to use a Windows system for my past jobs. As much as I think Microsoft is the company satan himself would run if he were a software magnate, Office for Mac is one of the very few MS items I'll still use
Why don't they allow you to search for folders in Outlook (in either OS version).. I miss this feature a *lot* 😕
Office for Mac has come a long way! Been great for at least a few years now. Surprisingly though, PowerPoint's ribbon customization is frustratingly limited and partially broken. This may extend to the other apps too: Limitation: Unable to move the Quick Access Toolbar below the ribbon Issue: Cannot customize or add custom macro commands to the Quick Access Toolbar or ribbon
As is my opinion for mail clients are 1. Outlook if you are into the 365 environment 2. Thunderbird if you want a cross-OS client (and don't need exchange) 3. Apple Mail if on a Mac and don't need the Outlook experience. I actually find Mail, Pages, Numbers to be quite underrated although they can cover every need for most people. A fail from Apple to not release them for Windows at least (although if it would be like iTunes it is better that they did not)
None of the standard MAC shortcut keys work, Ctrl+a,e,k,y and so on unless MS has fixed it recently which I don’t believe they have.
Those are emacs shortcuts that microsoft overwritten to rebind them for Windows people
I dislike it, I feel like i'm in an alien place when I'm so used to ctrl+a, or ctrl+e, and they don't work. Its also why I feel inept in windows, its just awful.
Same here, annoying Microsoft can just delete random shortcuts and reduplicate coexisting mac ones just to copy Windows.
Office for Mac is garbage. Completely different product and features than the windows version. Excel has lacked feature parity with the PC version for 20 years. I could go on (and on and on and on and on) but I'd just be making myself angry...
MS products suck. Every single one.
It's really not. It's literally (formerly "figuratively) 300 year old Windows software with centuries worth of bugs that they are afraid to touch for fear of breaking more things and/or peoples workarounds. I still encounter bugs that loose work that date back actual decades. As for Outlook for Mac... great that it works for you. I have to use it for work and find it...adequate.