- How To Use Outlook Tasks Effectively
- Outlook Task Vs To Do List
- Outlook For Mac Tasks Not Syncing
- Tasks In Outlook For Mac
Microsoft has plugged some key gaps in its 'new Outlook' for macOS, currently in preview and given a fresh update just a few days ago, but the product still has puzzling omissions that drive users back to the old version.
The revised Mac Outlook was first revealed at the Ignite event in late 2019. It appears to be a complete rebuild of the Mac email client, geared towards Office 365, but the question administrators will be pondering is whether important features in the existing Outlook will ever appear in the new one.
The history of Outlook on the Mac is inglorious. Microsoft and Mac go back a long way. Excel, for example, was a Mac application two years before it appeared on Windows. When it came to Outlook though, Mac users lost out. Outlook on Windows goes back to 1997, but the first full Mac version did not appear until Outlook 2011, and even that was not very good, slower than the Windows version and missing some features, such as Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).
Get time back when you’re all caught up with what’s new in your Focused Inbox. Free with Outlook for iOS Connect. Get things done on the go with Outlook mobile. Work efficiently with email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and more—together in one place. Office integration lets you share. Get Time Management - Outlook for Mac 2016 Calendar and Tasks,Learn how to use the robust calendar and task management capabilities. Apple includes basic task management capabilities in its OS X Mountain Lion OS. I'm a student trying to setup tasks to track assignments in the Outlook app for Mac. I tried many ways to create a task but none are showing up under tasks. When I navigate to the tasks page, the 'create task' button is greyed out. When I click 'new items' 'task' and create it this way, it never shows up on the tasks. If you’ve already been using our app on Android, iOS, Windows, or web, then the Mac app will feel very familiar. Sign in and all your tasks will be waiting for you, ready to be checked off. You can work offline, add tasks to My Day, see your flagged email in your Flagged email list, and share your lists with colleagues or friends and family.
VBA has never come to Outlook on the Mac, but a 2014 release was much improved, as Microsoft began to push the idea of Office 365 everywhere rather than keeping users hooked on Windows.
The new Outlook for the Mac in its first preview (click to enlarge)
Fast-forward to today, and there is not that much missing in Outlook 365 for Mac versus Windows, VBA aside.
All that is set to change with the latest new Outlook Mac as the pendulum swings away from making the Mac Outlook close to the Windows one, and towards giving Mac users a more distinct experience. It is also a matter of protocols. The existing Outlook Mac uses Exchange Web Services (EWS) which is being phased out.
Outlook on Windows generally uses MAPI over HTTP, perhaps the nearest thing to a native Exchange protocol. Microsoft is not happy with either and for its 'modern' mail client in Windows 8 and Windows 10 it developed a new sync protocol. In the past this was sometimes called Hx but it seems now to go by the name Microsoft Sync.
When Microsoft acquired Accompli in 2014, whose product became Outlook Mobile, it used its own protocol but that too now uses Microsoft Sync. According to presentations at Ignite 2019, this new sync protocol is designed specifically for mail-related data and makes the best even of poor connections, prioritising recent data.
The move from EWS to Microsoft Sync enables new features and improved performance, and no longer downloads the entire mailbox to the local machine. System requirements are for macOS 10.14 Mojave and Office 365, Outlook.com or Gmail email accounts.
The snag with a rebuilt Outlook for Mac is that having nearly caught up with Windows Outlook, it is now far behind in terms of features. It is in preview and some will reappear, but it is unlikely to be the full set. It hardly qualifies as a mail client in its current incarnation, with no support for standard protocols like POP3 and IMAP, nor any way of connecting to on-premises Exchange.
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READ MORE'We don't support on-prem yet but it's going to come soon,' said Microsoft in November 2019; six months on it is not there yet. On the plus side, it not only looks pretty, with full support for the Mac's Dark Mode on Catalina, but also performs well, with a fluidity that frankly feels unusual in a Mac Outlook product.
How To Use Outlook Tasks Effectively
Features of the new Outlook for Mac include a new unified inbox view that avoids clicking between accounts, if you have several configured. You can now reply to emails inline ('nested compose'), a convenience feature that has been in Windows Outlook for some time. There is a new 'ignore conversation' option. Creating meetings uses a new simplified dialogue that you can expand as needed.
As for the new features added in the June update, these include add-in support (a big deal), sensitivity labels for classifying confidential data, a People view for managing contacts, an option to create an event directly from an email, read receipts, and a 'coming soon' promise of the ability to open shared calendars and to encrypt emails with S/MIME.
The actual preview release did not quite live up to the promise. In particular, the People view is not yet enabled, thanks to some last-minute bug that was discovered. One gets the new Outlook by signing up to the Office 'Insider Fast' channel, and after the new version downloads and installs, one can switch back and forth by toggling a 'New Outlook' switch. If the user attempts to use a feature such as the People view, a message pops up inviting the user to switch back, wrecking the fluid experience but that is what one gets for trying a preview.
The current preview is not fully usable, but fortunately switching back is quick
The problem of Outlook on Windows being different from Outlook on Mac will get worse
Outlook Task Vs To Do List
Microsoft has not specified a release date for the new Outlook Mac but a few things are clear. First, it will be the best Outlook yet, perhaps on any platform, in terms of appearance and design. This is not a high bar: Outlook on Windows is a mess from a user interface perspective, and has dialogues buried within that have not changed for decades. Performance also looks promising.
Second, Outlook Mac will be focused on cloud, especially Office 365, though it also already has good support for Google mail. Teams integration will also be strong and Microsoft has demonstrated features like converting an event to a Teams meeting, handy in times of lockdown.
Lastly, the problem of Outlook on Windows being different from Outlook on Mac will get worse. What if Microsoft replaces the Windows version with a similarly rebuilt product? Perhaps it will; but the difficulty is that Outlook is baked into the Windows ecosystem and forms part of workflows, some automated with COM technology, that will break if Microsoft replaces it. Custom add-ins, VBA projects, ancient APIs that remain for legacy reasons, all mean this will be a tricky application to replace.
Creating a meeting in the new Outlook Mac: just drag in the calendar and this simple dialog pops up
Outlook on Windows is perhaps the most annoying of Microsoft's Office products, yet the job it does is a critical one, bringing together email, calendar and tasks, and providing collaboration features like shared calendars and contacts. Some legacy features, like Exchange public folders, made their way into Office 365 where they have become something of a burden to Microsoft.
The new Outlook for Mac, when it comes out of preview, will represent Microsoft's current thinking on how Outlook should look and behave in the cloud era, but it will be some time before that can apply in Windows as well. ®
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May 16, 2015
Last November (2014), Microsoft released a new Mac version of Outlook—one that replaces Outlook 2011 for Mac. While some people are calling this Outlook 2015, or Outlook 15, Microsoft is simply calling it Outlook for Mac, and it is only available to Office 365 subscribers.
Outlook For Mac Tasks Not Syncing
We had put off looking at it since we rarely use Macs anymore and none of our clients were asking us about it. But recently we have been getting a few questions asking for guidance, so we downloaded it (through our Office 365 subscription) and took a quick look today.
MYN/1MTD Recommendation: Don’t Uprade if Using Tasks
To cut to the chase, if you are an MYN or 1MTD user and using tasks in Outlook 2011, don’t upgrade yet. The reason is Microsoft has for some reason removed the Scripts menu, so there is now no easy way to convert emails to tasks using a script. Converting e-mail to tasks is a crucial part of MYN/1MTD, and in Outlook 2011 for Mac an added AppleScript was the only way to do it quickly. In this newer version, there is NO way to do it quickly—the only way we see to do this now is to copy and paste the contents of an e-mail into a manually-created new task (ugh!).
That said, there may be a workaround. In the comments section of the article cited below, some people say they have figured out hack-like ways to make some scripts work. But they don’t cite the convert-to-task script, and in any case, we’re not going to recommend our users jump through hoops like that (unless you really want to, but you are on your own).
And perhaps Microsoft will add the Script menu back in, in later releases of the product.
Also, the same limit in task subsorting that was in Outlook 2011 still exists in this new version, so MYN users are still forced to create smart folders to group by priority and subsort on date. That was never a good solution.
So for now, if you must use tasks in Outlook on a Mac, stick with Outlook 2011 for Mac. That’s what ships currently anyway if you install Office 365 on a Mac. To find the newer Outlook for Mac version you have to make a special effort. And you cannot buy a boxed or separately licensed version of the newer version. It’s almost as if Microsoft is treating this like a beta, while awaiting the new version of Office for Mac to be released (likely this fall).
Because of all these limitations, Outlook 2011 for Mac is still the only Mac version of Outlook that we have documented for use with MYN or 1MTD. See the 4th Edition of the book Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook for that documentation.
Not using Outlook Tasks? Go Ahead and Upgrade
All that said, perhaps you don’t use tasks in Outlook 2011? As an MYN or 1MTD user, perhaps you are using Toodledo for tasks (as we recommend), and only using Outlook 2011 for everything else: Mail, Calendar, and People. If so, the script omission is no big deal, and in that case then sure, go ahead and upgrade to this new Outlook version. There are no huge feature improvements—the software looks and behaves much like Outlook 2011 for Mac. But a lot of behind the scene improvements have been made that reportedly make it faster and more reliable. So an upgrade may be worthwhile to you.
Tasks In Outlook For Mac
Note though, support for Exchange 2007 has been dropped. And you need a new-ish version of the Mac OS to make it run (OS X 10.9.4 or later). There are other caveats as well; see the article below for more details.
Good Article on the new Outlook for Mac
To learn more, take a look at this linked article. It discusses the new Outlook for Mac version including new features, system requirements, and the missing scripts menu: http://www.officeformachelp.com/2014/11/microsoft-revamps-features-for-outlook-for-mac-15/
Michael