Notes and Outlook – Likes and Dislikes

I’m not the kind of person who actually ‘love’ or ‘hates’ anything, well not when it comes to IT, it’s only stuff on a two dimensional screen after all .

 

So linking together my post on intuitive software and my complaints about lack of process I thought I would further enhance my thesis that there is no ‘common sense’ by talking about two piece of software that I use every day, my email clients – Notes and Outlook. Yes, I get the joy and delight of using both and have done for many years, I’m not going to get too far into their advanced features, I’m talking here about email, calendaring and tasks and I’m only talking about the clients. It’s also a bit of a follow up to my post on technology zealot.

 

These are random thoughts and not meant as a detailed analysis of the things that get me going, they are just things that I have observed. The fact that I have observed them means that they either work better than I would regard as common sense or worse.

 

I’m a bit worried about writing this post though since reading yesterday’s article from Creating Passionate Users which basically said that if you ask people to explain why they regard something as good or bad their reasoning turns to mush, or at least that’s what I think it was saying .

 

Anywhere here goes, I’ve started so I had better see it through.

 

The first thing I need to explain is the difference in the way that I display the two products. I have Notes displayed in a grid configuration something like this:

 

 

My Outlook configuration is different, it’s like this:

 

 

I have absolutely no idea why they are different, they just are . I think it may have something to do with default configuration but that would be pure speculation.

 

My first dilemma is which product to start with, if I start with either then people will assume that I have a bias and that is not what I am wanting to say. I’ll say it again for those zealot out there – what I am saying is what I have observed as either better than or worse than my common sense in both products.

 

I really like the way that Notes does sorting in views, the idea of having many columns and being able to click on each one and for it to work quickly is great. I have a large mailbox and it always amazes me how quickly it can do the resorting. Outlook doesn’t quite do it particularly the way that I have Outlook configured, there is only enough room for one column really. I use grouping and I like that a lot. At this point I also have to say that I break every tenet of GTD and keep everything in my Inbox. I don’t actually see why I need to move it elsewhere, I don’t get bothered that it’s in their. I work a process whereby I flick through the mail, if it needs an immediate action I action it, if it needs thinking about or needs longer time I flag it for follow-up. That brings me onto my next point.

 

I really like the way that Outlook does flagging of items, it makes perfect sense to me to be able to right click an item and to be able to quickly give something a tag. There are two dislikes of Notes here. The first one is that flagging requires me to do too much clicking. First I have to click on ‘follow-up’ which gives me a drop down list to choose from. The options on here demonstrate some lazy coding because it asks me if I want to ‘add or edit a flag’, or to ‘remove a flag’. I have an item selected and they should know whether the item already has a flag which need modifying or removing or whether it doesn’t have one at all and hence needs adding. Anyway, assuming it’s a new flag that I am wanting to add I click on ‘Add or Edit Flag’ I then get another dialogue box asking me lots of things about the flag. Now this is where the common sense bit comes in. I know that it’s not really lazy coding . I know that the coding has been done that way to allow for the selection of and flagging of multiple documents; but it’s not common sense to me to do that; it’s not the way I work. I want to flag individual items very quickly because that’s how I deal with my email. Once flagged I then go through and prioritise. I can’t prioritise until I have flagged everything because I don’t know what something’s relative priority is gong to be until I have got to the end of my stack of unread emails. Outlook, however, works the way I want to work, it follows my common sense.

 

The next part of my problem with Notes flagging actually affects more than just flagging it is a problem throughout Notes and that is the use of the right-click and double-click. Why can’t I right click an item in my inbox to flag it? Why when I double-click an attachment does it open the properties dialogue box and not open the attachment? Why when I right-click on an item in my inbox can’t I reply?

 

Notes semi-offline experience is great, really great. Working on local data, but still being able to get to online data without telling Notes that it is now online is great. Outlook Cache mode goes some way to catching up on this one but it’s nothing like as flexible. With Notes I can choose which database is used locally, even down to the address book, Outlook can’t do that. If I’m in cache mode I get the offline address book, no choice.

 

Well this post is getting long, perhaps I had better finish there and put some more into a later post. Just a quick thought before I finish though. If you are thinking about telling me that I can use Outlook against Notes and that should give me the best experience then don’t bother because I’ve tried it and it is terrible, and anyway as I said at the beginning I’m not doing a detailed comparison of the two I’m just making observations.