Bob Browning's blog

Lat week my wife’s desktop Outlook stopped working. It wouldn’t even start in safe mode. All the fixes we found on the web didn’t solve the problem. So the obvious solution was uninstall it and reinstall it. All our data is replicated on Outlook.com, so it would get downloaded from the Outlook server and she would be back in business.

We went into the control panel apps page. Because Outlook is part of Office 365 we ran the Office 365 uninstall and install programs. This didn’t solve the problem. OK – no problem we can just install Outlook as a stand-alone. This worked fine, the mails were all downloaded and we were back to normal.

Except we weren’t.

The first indication of trouble was our attempt to format the screen. Where is the field chooser? Every Outlook I can remember has allowed you to customise which fields are listed but somehow we couldn’t find it. This was the tip of an iceberg. All sorts of features were missing.

What is going on here?

Outlook has been with us for nearly 30 years and comes bundled in with other paid-for office products. If you didn’t want to pay for these products, Microsoft offered free Mail and Calendar programs, which were basic but without bells and whistles. This year, Microsoft released a new product called “New Outlook” (aka “Outlook Monarch”) as a free product to replace the older Mail and Calendar products. It is almost identical to the Outlook.com web application, and some suspect it is just a front end to that.

Microsoft called it ‘New Outlook’, not Outlook Express or Basic Outlook. They have made it known that they plan to replace the old outlook with this new product.

Microsoft provide a link to download Classic Outlook. which we tried. It looks a lot like the download of the whole of Microsoft 365, and we still had the same problem. I am starting to think that our copy of classic outlook is fine, and the problem lies elsewhere. My wife is getting bored with this now and the nuclear option of removing the whole of Office 365 and reinstalling it from the Office download (64 bit version) (which some claim will work) is just not going to happen.

But “new Outlook” is clearly an immature product.

• If, like me, you archive old items automatically you have a problem because the new product doesn’t currently open archive files (planned for next year).
• If you use an add-in, tough because they are not supported. I use the excellent Gsyncit product from Fieldstone software to synchronise our google calendar with outlook and have seen 15 years of software development go down the drain.
• You can’t work offline with the new Outlook, so we are not composing emails on the train.

A list of features supported is here. I notice that field chooser isn’t there.

We soldier on.

My wife is living with New Outlook. Fieldstone are developing a server-side version of Gsyncit. Fortunately my Outlook is still working fine. So we carry on. But be warned. ‘New’ software is normally an improvement on older versions. This isn’t.