01-04-2012, 07:03 PM

I switched from PC 6 mths ago and despite being mostly happy with the change, I have invested way more time than I'd liked trying to get back to the level of functionality I enjoyed on my PC before it died a spectacular death (which finally lead me to give up and try Mac-land).

Anyhoo, my post is about MS Outlook 2011 (OL). I made a carefully considered decision to 'remain with' OL after trying Mail for awhile. The disappointment is that OL 2011 does not hold a candle to its Windows version (I found great functionality with a very old OL 2002!).

I have been posting 'feedback' to MS on a regular basis in the hope that the growing list of omissions and glitches might be addressed with an update, but nothing yet.

Perhaps here I might find some help or response to individual issues. I don't want to recall all the issues right now, so I will post again as I come across them and when one particular one causes enough frustration (as happens just about every time I use OL).

The issues today are:

1. In Contact entries, there is no field for the State in an Address, eg: an address in Sydney is in the state of NSW. This is a significant omission that has 'lost' all this information from my contacts when I brought them over from the PC. Is it possible to include this information?
2. In Contact entries, there is no field for 'Other' in Phone numbers. I used this field to store the mobile number of a contact's partner (eg: husband or wife). This omission 'lost' all the mobile numbers stored in the 'Other' field in my contacts when I brought them over from the PC.
3. Mail: in custom arrangements there is no option to choose fields that appear. There is much functionality lost from the omission of choosing fields to display, one example is I can not see what time mail has arrived without selecting individual mail items.
4. Mail: in custom arrangements there is no option to have different views for different sub-folders in the 'Inbox', Sent Items', etc. eg if I change the view of ANY folder it changes the view for ALL the folders "On My Computer". Again too many examples here of the loss of functionality when you can't apply individual views to mail folders. This also applies to Contact folders.

I'll stop for now. Any help greatly appreciated.

01-05-2012, 08:19 AM

First, get used to using Help. Your frustrations are with no knowing the new software. your issues 1-4 are not true - I use Outlook 2011 every day and constantly edit and change contacts. As for views, in the preferences you can choose to change the view for any folder - I have my inbox set to only show Date, To, From, Subject (in that order) with no preview, but in the sub-folders I have preview turned on. The caveat, you have to change the view for each folder.

When you brought the contacts over from PC, how did you do it - mine asked me to match fields and I didnt lose a single piece of information, but I went through and did the field mapping meticulously. As for the different phone numbers, there should be a + sign next to the Phone field where you can add different numbers. I have a couple contacts with over 5 numbers assigned.

Again, get used to the help and check out the stuff online at Microsoft