Message composition is improved, especially when formatting an e-mail. Outlook's use of the tabbed Ribbon commands expands its capabilities. You can insert a photograph and preview live changes to it from a pull-down menu of styles. You can highlight text within an Outlook message, right-click on it, and quickly translate or find synonyms for the selected word. Still, it took us a couple of days to get used to the tabbed layout when we were writing e-mail messages.
Outlook 2007 lets you add RSS feeds within your list of folders so you can read your favorite news and blogs. You can match the feeds with those selected within Internet Explorer 7 but not within other browsers such as open-source Firefox.
Integration among applications has improved throughout Office 2007. For instance, if you receive a PowerPoint presentation attached to an e-mail in Outlook, right-clicking on the file name lets you preview a slide show. Similarly, you can preview documents from Word and Excel 2007 within an Outlook message. You can even highlight Excel columns and rows, although you can't edit them.
However, there are some downsides to Outlook 2007. We wish that it had tagging so we could organize e-mails by content, as Gmail does, rather than within folders. We found Outlook's Search Folders function for filtering less than intuitive. Also, many of the newsletters to which we subscribed were missing images and suffered from gaping blank spaces when read in Outlook 2007. In Outlook 2003, the same HTML e-mails looked polished and tight. That's because Outlook 2007 uses the same HTML standards as Word 2007 rather than those of Internet Explorer to render messages. Designers of newsletters and targeted e-mail advertising may have problems creating Outlook 2007-friendly content.
We like that Instant Search lets you pull down a list of criteria to drill down within a search, and it retrieved data faster than Outlook 2003 did. Instant Search is supposed to scour your messages, appointments, and RSS feeds, but it failed to find words within recent messages we had filed into Inbox subfolders.
Service and support
Boxed editions of Microsoft Office 2007 include a decent, 174-page Getting Started guide. During the first 90 days, you can contact tech support for free, and help at any time with any security-related or virus problem is also free. Beyond that, paid support costs a painfully high $49 per telephone call or e-mail. Luckily, Microsoft's online help is excellent, although we're displeased that Microsoft and other software makers are increasingly promoting do-it-yourself assistance. You can also pose questions to the large community of Microsoft Office users via free support forums and chats. Microsoft Office Diagnostics tool, included with Office 2007, is designed to detect and repair problems if something goes haywire.
Conclusion
Light users of Outlook are unlikely to need the changes offered by the 2007 version, but they may still benefit from the improved scheduling, message composition, and security. If Outlook is the nerve center of your digital communications and scheduling and you've wished for more flexibility in its older versions, then we recommend this upgrade.
