Mac question - Outlook or Mail?
 

My MBA is due to arrive tomorrow morning (yeah!!) and I was wondering whether mail is worth going with or MS Outlook? I currently use Office on my Windows laptop and will be buying it for the Mac for Word and Excel (need them I a lot of my time is spend reviewing and commeting Office docs sent to me by clients). Migration to the Mac Outlook would be the easier move I guess, given that it uses a PST file too (with built in import) plus the calender is intregrated whilst iCal is a seperate app (?).

Advice from anyone who has used both on the Mac would be great :thumb:

TIA.
Richard.

If your mail is in PST files then your going to need a Microsoft product to get them out anyhow, once you have entourage installed it's easier to move to mail. I'd set up a home account on Mail for a look at least, personally I'm loving the new fullscreen mail, conversation view including sent mail is a god send.

Entourage is not great, but works.

Thanks :thumb: - I'll give Mail a try for the home accounts.

Looks like Entourage has been replaced by Outlook for Office 2011 for Mac and I can grab a 30 day free trial before buying.

Looks like OutlooktoMac could be an option too - but it's not Lion compatible yet (http://www.littlemachines.com/).

i'd have a safe bet it would work with lion, you can download a trial anyways :D

Good point :thumb:

If they've updated it then great, that's all it needed. A refresh for Lion can't be far off.

You can of course use both and mail will or at least used to import from Office. I installed the trial just to dig out and archive some old mail a while back.

Yes, I'll give both a try to see what feels best. It tend to get the odd outlook meeting request through, but I think mail reads them as an ical request anyway - so should be fine on that front.

The wife has a MBPro arriving this week and I intend (I'm her "IT Department"!) to export her mail from Outlook (on XP) to mail on the Mac. Not sure what OS the new machine will come with but I can always download Lion anyway if not on the box. Apparently Mail on 10.7 is a lot better than previously but not having used a Mac since this sort of thing ... http://love80s.tumblr.com/post/71239...-by-apple-1984 ... I'm using Google as my expert ....

Take a look at ... http://guides.macrumors.com/Moving_E..._to_Apple_Mail ... for more info. Also ... http://www.pstconverterpro.com/ ... and ... http://www.techhit.com/messagesave/faq.html ... Maybe one of those will work for you? Not sure myself yet how I'll do it, it depends partly on how large the pst file is.

Dave

Great - thanks Dave, will have a read through the links :)

Is there a reason to use macs mail program instead of google apps???

Offline email. Integrated Email buttons. Spotlight search. I'm sure there are more. I use mail with 4 google accounts and only visit Gmail.com in a storm.

Why would you want to put all your personal information into Googles hands? What's the problem with keeping it to yourself on your ow computer? And why would you use Google docs on a Mac anyway ...??? :Suspiciou

Dave

Good for you if you can keep a mail server running, if you can't I'd rather Google look after my email than some spotty kid. The problem with keeping it yourself on your ow computer is I have more than one computer and I want them to all have exactly the same emails.

Google Docs is pretty good, I sometimes use it, but iDisk works better for me as iCloud will.

For me off-line email is a must as often I'm places where I don't get a good enough mobile connection or any wi-fi access.

I prefer mail to outlook.

Anyone had problems on Lion searching? Simple searches, like for 'password' don't return results any more. Am I missing a trick?

gmail works offline as well (turn it on in labs)

Looks like Migration Assistant will transfer all my Windows files, email, etc over for me :)

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4796

Good find!

Dave

Google shut it down.