I’ve been using Microsoft Entourage — part of the Office for Mac suite — as my primary email client since about, oh, 1995 or so; it’s the one product out of Redmond that really made start to think that Microsoft products might not be so bad. But there seems to be a world of difference between Microsoft for Mac products and those for Windows, because Outlook — Entourage’s counterpart on the Windows side — isn’t nearly as refined.
I’m supporting Windows users pretty much full-time at work these days, so I figured I’d better use the software they use, to force myself to learn the ins & outs of it so I’m better able to answer the questions that come up. In the process of switching over to the Dark Side (yes, The Dark Side), I’m finding Outlook 2007 to be a huge disappointment. That probably shouldn’t be a surprise to me.
There are many things I don’t care for in Outlook, but one thing that really frosted my cookies a while back was trying to create a distribution list… In Entourage, it’s as easy as can be; you select the names in your address book that you’d like to add, create a new distribution list — or Group, as they’re called in Entourage — and POOF, your newly-created group is already populated with the contacts you had selected. What could be easier?
What could be easier? Certainly not Outlook… To create a Distribution List (DL) in Outlook, there is no possible way — at least none that I was able to find — for a selection in your Contacts list to be carried over to a new DL. None. Drag & drop doesn’t even work. The only way to add members to a DL is to tell Outlook to create the DL then click Select Members and scroll through the list to find the email addresses you want to add. (Notice I didn’t say you need to find the Contact you wanted to add; the only selection you can make is by email address; more on that a little later.) Sure you can use the dialog to narrow down the list, or search for a particular string in the Contacts list, but puts severe limits on your search.
For example, I wanted to create a DL that had email addresses from a particular domain. In the Contacts list you can use the Search Contacts field to narrow down the visible items to those that match what you type there; type in the domain name and your list is whittled down to those contacts containing email or web page addresses that match. But there is no way to get that into a DL! That flippin’ drives me crazy.
I think part of the reason that Entourage can pull off a trick so neatly when the same thing makes Outlook puke all over itself is that in an Entourage Address Book entry you can have a pile of email addresses for a given entry, but one of those addresses is set as the Default. That way you can select a bunch of contacts and it knows which address to use when you load them into a Group. Outlook… just don’t work that way. And that’s too bad.
I guess this is just another example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Or an example of Microsoft being fat & lazy, not caring to make things easier for their user base.