Outlook for MAC has been a nightmare for me.
I went to a MAC last Fall after my daughter raved about hers and my wife got a sleek and beautiful MacBook Air. As a longtime OFFICE user, I was apprehensive, but the Apple store assured me that OFFICE for Mac was great. I bought a MACBOOK pro.
For excel, powerpoint and word the transition is reasonable, but the efficiency is lower in excel as some functions are much slower. This is workable.
OUTLOOK is another story. I tried to used Outlook for e-mail and contacts but had terrible difficulty. I ran Plaxo as a back-up for my address book and calendar. Outlook feeds to the iCal which eventually did not function with Plaxo and neither Plaxo or Apple could tell me why, so I gave up on calendar back-up to Plaxo. Getting Outlook to sync with the MAC address book was extremely difficult. And when I tried to make an entry by double clicking on the Outlook calendar, it would take over a minute for the calendar entry to come up - very aggravating.
All of the contacts in the MAC address book show as "On my MAC," and contacts in the MAC address book show as in the cloud. The cloud entries back up to the cloud, but the "on my MAC entries do not. The Genius Bar could not fix the constant beach-balls with Outlook. They had me back-up and reinstall, then we erased my hard drive and recopied everything back (Time machine had been corrupted). Then they replaced the wiring to the hard drive, then the hard drive, the the entire MACBOOK.
After numerous attempts to get outlook contacts to work on the MAC and after having my contacts duplicated four time over, I gave up on Outlook and moved to MAC's Mail, ical and address book. Massive amounts of time were spent trying to make outlook work. My recommendation is to not even try. Either stay on a PC or go to the MAC functions that replace Outlook.
The most significant loss from Outlook functionality is that you cannot tell what categories each of your contact entries belong to. You have to highlight the entry then scroll through the categories to see which ones are highlighted (and the highlighting is barely visible. The outlook feature that allowed you to see all of the categories of an individual in one entry is lost. I used categories extensively to track the "characteristics" of contact entries, so this is a big loss. Any suggestions on how to tell what groups an entry belongs to would be appreciated.
I also find that when I add a contact to my address book from an e-mail, I have to do two steps 1)add the entry, then 2)open contact card for me to be able to slide the entry into a category. Very cumbersome. Then I get a beach-ball for about thirty seconds when I go back to mail. Apparently mail is talking to the address book and takes some time to recover.
In short, forget about Outlook on the MAC.
Ron
Ron Hoffman
ronhoffman (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
On Jan 12, 2012, at 3:23 PM, Cathy Allington wrote:
> Thanks Diane and Richard:
> I feel like a klunz asking such basic questions about Outlook! I worked with Entourage some years ago, and it was very similar to OL for the PC with Contacts Folder etc - a couple of limitations, but just trying to help a nephew out who runs a recruitment business. He has all his contacts on paper and no database!!!
> Cheers
> Cathy
> Cathy Allington
> You Grow Pty Ltd
> From: outlook-users (AT) yahoogroups (DOT) com [mailto
utlook-users (AT) yahoogroups (DOT) com] On Behalf Of Diane Poremsky
> Sent: Friday, 13 January 2012 8:49 AM
> To: outlook-users (AT) yahoogroups (DOT) com
> Subject: RE: [outlook-users] Outlook for Mac
> That's not really categories.... but now I know where Hotmail got it from - they use the same term for their DL's.
> 
I'm sure you could get it from ebay if you really wanted it.
