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I upgraded to Office 2003 yesterday, which is covered by the University’s site license, so it only costs me $25. I am quite pleased; it is definitely worth that price, but maybe not the $270 Amazon charges. Interesting features include:

• A fascinating revamp to Outlook’s mail-reading interface. By using three parallel vertical panes to let you navigate email messages, Microsoft makes it much easier to scan a number of messages and actually read the one that is selected. In doing so they have abandoned the traditional one-row/many-column table used for navigating amongst messages. Changing the conventions of a UI is always hard, and I hated this approach for about half an hour, but now I think it is fantastic. I also predict that it will be much imitated in no time. (I should say that Outlook is not generally my mail client of choice, but we have to use an Exchange server at school, so it is what I use.)
• Also, using Outlook/Exchange is much less sluggish, particularly over a VPN. (I think they decided to cache everything possible.) This is more of a correction to a past problem than an innovative new feature, but I am still thankful for it.
  Word added a feature I have wanted for years. When you open a word document to read it, it gives you a view like Adobe Acrobat (no insertion point, easy to navigate around, etc.), as opposed to making you try to read a document in an editing mode. That might make me less likely to resent people who put Word documents on websites.

• I haven’t played with Excel and PowerPoint much, but they look to be pretty much the same. In fact, excluding the shading on the buttons, little that is fundamental about the apps has changed. Which is good for Office users who are used to their applications, or open-source projects that are trying to catch up with Office.

Updated:
Paul wanted a clearer picture of the three-paned view, so rather than try to explain it I’ll just attach a screenshot:
As you can see, instead of folders on the left, a message list on the top and message body on the bottom, they have all three next to each other in vertical panes. In my opinion, this is a flat-out better design choice. First of all, it is more logical; as you read left to right you go from a list of folders to a list of messages to a message body. Secondly, both message lists and message bodies benefit from being tall rather than wide. It lets you scroll through the messages more easily, it gives the message body the same general proportions as a paper document, and it causes you to be able to read more text because you have more lines to give up to carriage returns. The major disadvantage is that you get less information about messages displayed in the list, but I have found that manageable. It is also irritating that the message body no longer displays recipient information at the top of it, although that is a decision that is independent of this design.

While I am on the subject, I should mention two other niceties. This Outlook has a pleasant view mode that is driven by a conversation, so it is easy to refer back to related old emails. Also, you will note on the screenshot that some messages have a red flag next to them. All you have to do is click on that flag, and the message will show up in your list of follow-up messages to be written. Older outlooks had a feature like that, but it was much harder to access.

While on the topic of mail clients, I should mention that Opera’s M2 is a cool program. It is much more of a revolutionary shift in how one interacts with email, and I think it is probably a precursor to what GMail will look like. I didn’t like it enough to change my habits, but it certainly made me think about how email could be improved.

Update 2:
The good news is that I figured out how to make the header information I wanted show up in the email browsing pane. The bad news is that I did it my inadvertently right-clicking on the small gray border around the message.

Also, after looking at the new Outlook more, I think that its ‘Search Folders’ could be used a lot like M2, where you never file away old email, you just make it easy to search. However it would be a much nicer solution if system administrators were less stingy with their mailbox quotas. Fifty megabytes? Amazon is offering me 80 GB for $95, and at that price the school is investing a whopping 4.2 cents in my mailbox. I wonder if I could go to IT with a quarter, get my mailbox quadrupled and get some change. And most ISP’s I have had are just as bad.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 14th, 2004 at 10:54 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.