Giving Up Outlook
A few weeks ago I decided I would try giving up Microsoft Outlook. I already used Gmail as my primary email account, and was getting frustrated with trying to achieve a two-way sync between Google Calendar and my Outlook appointments, so I thought I would just give up Outlook for Google. And honestly, it’s a lot easier than I thought it would be. The main reason I used Outlook wasn’t just for use as an email client – if it was as simple as email, I would have given up Outlook for Gmail years ago. No, I used Outlook as a management system for my appointments, tasks, address book and email.
Everything I liked about Outlook, I can accomplish with Google, with few exceptions. I love Google Calendar, and the ability to manage my calendar and appointments online. I can share my calendar, manage invites, and have my daily agenda emailed to me so I don’t forget anything. With the personalized Google homepage, I basically created a web based version of Outlook’s “Today” view; email inbox, upcoming appointments, and tasks with upcoming due dates. Embedding my email and calendar into my homepage were the easy tasks; Google doesn’t yet have a to-do list, and so I had to look elsewhere for list management. Remember The Milk does Task management, and then some. You can share tasks with other users, tag tasks, associate a web page, give a time estimate, and more.
Honestly, the only thing I can’t accomplish with Gmail is auto-adding birthdays and anniversaries from contact information into a calendar, which would be really nice. Otherwise, I can never remember who has an upcoming birthday or anniversary. Another thing I wish Google would add is the ability to label/tag/categorize contacts. I would love to be able to filter out contacts; say I want to send an email out to family, but I don’t want to make a “Family” mailing list. If I could just filter out business contacts and friends, that would be convenient.
I love my google calendar. I use it for everything! What makes it even better is that Jesse has access to my calendar and he doesn’t need me around to see it. Plus I have access to his so if he tells me an appointment, he knows it gets onto the calendar because I’m better about it than he is.
It’s so handy to have it online, I can check it everywhere and I can add things no matter where I’m at.
What’s the difference between adding a label to a contact and making a mailing list? You’re basically doing that with the label. Honestly, gmail’s contacts has the labeling feature, but it does create a mailing group. It’s just like the labeling feature for email. I can have multiple groups attached to one name and all I have to type is “IRC” in the to field in an email and all 20 names appear (for instance). It’s actually really nice considering I don’t have to open each contact to attach it to a group either.
Well, the main reason I would use labels is not necessarily for a mailing list. This past weekend we had a surprise baby shower for my sister; to help organize it would have been nice to be able to pull up everyone with a “Family” tag, but exclude my sister in any kind of organizational email, since it was a surprise. I guess it would be like using a mailing list, but being able to delete specific people off of it, for certain occasions. For that type of usage, I suppose the groups would work ok.
What I dislike about it is that there is no way to look at JUST the contacts, without also including the groups. That, and to add someone to a group, you have to edit the group; it would be nice to be able to add people by editing the group or by editing the contact and modifying what groups they belong to. Or if you were just trying to email people that were in the overlap of two distinct groups, you can’t really filter so you’re viewing the people from just one group.
When you’re composing the message and you type “family” in the to field…all of the email addresses pop in. You don’t just have “family”, so if there are any addresses you want to delete you can without removing it from the master list. Try playing with it, you might find you like it.