2 days ago a place I'm at switched us from Google mail + calendar + meet to Microsoft outlook + calendar + teams.
I almost can't believe at how good Google's suite of tools are compared to Microsoft. I never used any of MS' office tools until a few days ago.
Outlook's web app doesn't even let you click into an email to mark it as read. You have to explicitly click the mark as read button. It also doesn't intuitively support filters with emails that have + in their name (each email ends up being unique instead of Google doing the more expected thing of letting the filter match all + variants). It also doesn't update its title bar with a count of emails in your inbox. That's things I discovered after using it for about 10 minutes.
Microsoft's calendar is designed so poorly, there's so many quality of life things that aren't there vs Google. There's too many to list but the biggest one is not being able to see the calendar details of team mates when inviting them to an event. All you see is a blocked out amount of time, you can't see their exact schedules even if they shared their calendar with you. This removes a huge human element to scheduling meetings because often times I'll avoid scheduling meetings when folks are just getting out of a long meeting, or I'll buffer it by 15-30 minutes depending on who is doing what beforehand.
I'm not not looking forward to the day when we'll need to use all of MS' tools to replace Google docs + spreadsheet and Slack.
I think the worst part is their authentication, for some reason I have a personal account that was invited as a guest in an organization to use Teams. I can only access the Teams workspace if I click through a link in my emails and I have to login twice. It only works on the web version, I can't login the app at all.
But once you're in Teams, everything is so much worse, it's like using a hacked version of MS Word to chat. But where Slack actually shines is around the workflows, automation and bots, I don't think Teams has much of that.
I think most things you describe are just getting used to product difference / configuration options.
Clicking an email definitely marks it as read.
The calendar schedule not being revealed is a just a privacy option, each person must opt-in to share the exact meeting details.
Having used both gsuite and office I find that they both get job done fairly well
> The calendar schedule not being revealed is a just a privacy option, each person must opt-in to share the exact meeting details.
We've done this as far as I know. We also added each other to our directory. I can see the details of other team mate's calendars in the full view but this does not show up in the mini-view when you add a guest to an event.
With Google, when you create a new event and put in a user's email as a guest it immediately showed you a full list of their exact events with times and whether or not they accepted an optional meeting (an outlined or filled circle). It was great to see at a glance while you're in the process of creating the event.
With MS' calendar all you see is a red block of color around the times they are not available.
> Clicking an email definitely marks it as read.
It doesn't for me when using Chrome. When I click into an email the title remains bold and the inbox count doesn't decrease. Keep in mind this is the web app. I didn't install the dedicated app, but I also used the web version of all of Google's tools too.
The sharing aspect has already been done. It still doesn't show the details in the mini-view where you insert the person's name as a guest which is the most important time to see such information.
You just see a big chunk of red with no details. You don't even see things like "busy". It's just a solid red color.
The key is that there are 5 permission levels: (1) None, (2) Can view when I'm busy, (3) Can view titles and locations, (4) Can view all details, and (5) Can edit.
Is that too much control? Maybe, but it's helpful when you want to share more details with teammates than you do with others, grant admins edit permissions, etc.
The email gets marked as read once you click out of the email to view a different one (which I agree is unintuitive, but it is not true you have to explicitly click "mark as read").
The location for setting mail read on selected is settings-> mail-> message handling-> Mark as read.
Outlook also defaults to not marking messages as unread when the unread filter is on. I presume because profiles were setting the filter and then complaining their messages were disappearing? You can change rose on the same settings page
> Outlook's web app doesn't even let you click into an email to mark it as read.
It absolutely does let you do that. I use OWA as my daily driver and that is the behaviour at least on my end. Settings->Mail->Message Handling should have the options you want.
The web experience of Word, Power Point and Excel, are appalling. Laggy, resource hogs. Excel & Power Point are damn near unusable on anything complicated.
And the group editing in those products...! Every time we've edited Excel sheets with more than one person it quickly restored in unresolvable merge conflicts and forked files. This has always worked beautifully in Google Sheets.
From what I've heard, the sync works well when everyone's using the same kind of client (eg. desktop, or web app). If they get mixed things become slowwe to update and have a decent chance to quickly go to hell.
They're nice in a pinch, but I advise folks to think of them primarily as viewers. In my experience, for any serious work you'll want to use the native apps.
> In my experience, for any serious work you'll want to use the native apps.
Don't you see how absurd that is in 2023? It's like me saying "Online shops are nice in a pinch, but I advise folks to think of them primarily as viewing goods. In my experience, for any serious shopping you'll want to visit the bricks and mortar shop"
I understand that POV, but I should temper my "serious work" statement by saying that the Office web apps are pretty great and keep getting better. However, the native desktop apps are just better.
It's hard to make a direct comparison with Google's web-app-only strategy since the Workspace apps are toys in comparison, more akin to Apple's iWork suite.
I haven't used Sheets as extensively as I've used Excel, and once upon a time I was a real Excel machine who knew all the alt menu navigation by heart (great precursor training for vim) but I have slowly become a Sheets convert.
Being able to write appscript between all the Workplace products was pretty painless.
I haven't tried to push Sheets to do million row fat sheets for crunching but wouldn't be surprised if it does ok
I am using Excel on windows again lately and it is reasonably smooth but boy do I miss Drive + Sheets + collaboration for a 2023 remote workflow
I can totally see that, and Sheets seems like the most capable app in the suite. And although I found myself frusted by Docs and Slides limitations, I know that they're perfectly fine for lots of (maybe most?) use cases.
> Web tools are always going to be weak vs. locally executing tools. I've never seen one that I prefer to a native equivalent.
Sure, that's a fact which I don't dispute, but that doesn't mean that writing a word document in your browser should be such a bad experience that you really just want to use the web version for viewing documents, which is the absurd thing to which I responded. See, what you say is true, but that doesn't necessarily negate my point if you can agree?
Word is not Photoshop, I expect the web version to be powerful enough to get serious writing done via it.
I don't. I expect MSFT to make a hash of it, and to do so in an environment (a browser) that I've never found equal to the task of "getting out of the way and letting me write."
The default configuration is: * Mark as read after selection changes
Which in my opinion is really weird. I've been using email for 20 years and no other client I've used works this way. It's so inefficient since you need to click into a previously read email to mark a different email as read.
But, I did switch things to mark it as read when chosen which fixes it.
Oh web outlook ugh. People where I work hate Outlook web. It's not intuitive. Shared mailboxes in web Outlook are a pain they dont show on the left sidebar they need to be opened in a separate tab. Terrible for efficiency. Except "out of office" which for shared mailboxes it can't be disabled in non-web Outlook you have to do it in web.
One big annoying thing is that when you mark an email as unread in Outlook on mobile, the default is to mark the entire email chain as unread. So if you have a long email chain, all of sudden there will be like 20-30 unread messages in your inbox. It should have the ability to mark unread from here or something like that.
Purely my subjective experience but the MS tools seem designed to keep the users that have been using Outlook on the desktop for decades. I get ornery when it doesn't work the way I'm used to.
I spent some time dinking around in Outlook once trying to find where some feature had been moved to. Ended up apologizing to the user... they were due to retire soon, and who knows where some UI twizzle had put the whatever in that manifestation of the mediocre malware.
IMO outlook calendar has the fundamental design flaw that it uses email to share (at least some) state, rather than entries in a central server. Things like inviting someone to a meeting I rejected are super hard to impossible. Group meetings while the host is out are a disaster.
> not being able to see the calendar details of team mates when inviting them to an event. All you see is a blocked out amount of time, you can't see their exact schedules even if they shared their calendar with you. This removes a huge human element to scheduling meetings because often times I'll avoid scheduling meetings when folks are just getting out of a long meeting, or I'll buffer it by 15-30 minutes depending on who is doing what beforehand.
This is configurable, you can make your calendars public and convince your teammates (and potentially the rest of the company) to do so as well.
Agree with some of the points, but why would the + in the email name be considered anything else than part of the name? This is a Gmail feature, not part of any RFC that I know of...or are you talking about something else, perhaps?
> I never used any of MS' office tools until a few days ago.
and then
> Outlook's web app doesn't even let you click into an email to mark it as read.
Did it occur to you that maybe a few days of use isn't enough for you to understand how to use office? Everything you complained about works fine, even if you don't understand how to do it.
2 days ago a place I'm at switched us from Google mail + calendar + meet to Microsoft outlook + calendar + teams.
I almost can't believe at how good Google's suite of tools are compared to Microsoft. I never used any of MS' office tools until a few days ago.
Outlook's web app doesn't even let you click into an email to mark it as read. You have to explicitly click the mark as read button. It also doesn't intuitively support filters with emails that have + in their name (each email ends up being unique instead of Google doing the more expected thing of letting the filter match all + variants). It also doesn't update its title bar with a count of emails in your inbox. That's things I discovered after using it for about 10 minutes.
Microsoft's calendar is designed so poorly, there's so many quality of life things that aren't there vs Google. There's too many to list but the biggest one is not being able to see the calendar details of team mates when inviting them to an event. All you see is a blocked out amount of time, you can't see their exact schedules even if they shared their calendar with you. This removes a huge human element to scheduling meetings because often times I'll avoid scheduling meetings when folks are just getting out of a long meeting, or I'll buffer it by 15-30 minutes depending on who is doing what beforehand.
I'm not not looking forward to the day when we'll need to use all of MS' tools to replace Google docs + spreadsheet and Slack.