

Personally, we find it a relief from the old style of toolbar-mania. The Ribbon is the Marmite of the software world you either love it or hate it. The overall look and feel of Outlook is more consistent with the Windows version, and adopts the context-sensitive Ribbon that's now common across both Mac and Windows versions of Office.

But almost everything else has changed, and some features notably the Projects feature in Entourage, which let you group together related contacts, tasks, meetings and mail messages, is gone. This is good, as both are excellent features. For example, the Mailing List Manager and Rules system are essentially unchanged. Outlook doesn't completely abandon everything from Entourage. When you’re ready, you can go through the changes and edits that other people made to a shared document in Office 2011 for Mac that Word has tracked and work toward creating a final document.
Microsoft 2011 for mac review mac os x#
This is sensible, given Apple's general indication that Cocoa is the future of Mac programming, and it also allows Microsoft to take advantage of new Mac OS X technologies more easily in the future. Microsoft has taken the opportunity to use Cocoa, rather than Carbon, as the key API. It is still a more-than capable POP and IMAP client, but Exchange users will get the most out of the new application. Why? Because unlike Entourage, Outlook focuses much more heavily on connectivity with Exchange servers.

With Office 2011, Microsoft has taken the opportunity to rethink Entourage, and has effectively binned it for a new, ground-up rewrite which it has named Outlook. Not only did Entourage look better than Outlook, but it had features like a Projects section that Outlook lacked. It's arguable that Entourage, the personal information management and email application introduced with Office 2001 for Mac, was superior to Outlook, it's Windows counterpart.
