Microsoft Office / Outlook
We reviewed Microsoft’s current offering of Office apps on iOS (iPads and iPhones). Microsoft first dipped its toe into iOS when it offered the free OneNote app, a rich text, drawing, and rich media note taking app, back in 2011. Then about a year ago, in spring 2014, Microsoft brought out touch-optimized versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Apple’s mobile devices. These were designed from the beginning with a touch interface, unlike the versions for Windows 8, which were designed primarily to work with a mouse and keyboard and secondarily with a touch screen that was available on some Windows 8 machines. Initially the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps were offered free for viewing documents, while editing required an Office 365 subscription, which allowed access to Office on a few different devices and computers you might own. Then, last fall, Microsoft updated the three apps to allow most editing features for free, with only a few features reserved for those with a paid Office 365 subscription. For example, the track changes feature that keeps track of edits made by multiple people, is only available for those with a paid subscription.
Just this past month Microsoft added to the collection its Outlook app, which is their combined e-mail, calendar, and contacts app. They had bought the small company behind the Acompli app and rebranded it as Outlook. It works of course with Microsoft Exchange accounts that are common in workplaces, but also with some popular services like Gmail and Yahoo!. In fact, after our Apple monthly workshop meeting they quickly updated it to work with any IMAP-capable e-mail service, such as AOL, or probably whatever e-mail service your internet provider offers. (IMAP is the protocol that mirrors your e-mail locally, but always keeps e-mail on the server so that it is available from any device or computer you have. Contrast this with POP—post office protocol—that downloads your e-mail to a specific computer, so that it may not be available on some other computer you have.) Aside from combining e-mail, calendar, and contacts, Outlook’s most prominent feature is the way it sorts e-mail into “Focus” e-mail versus “Other” e-mail. Focus e-mail is likely to be e-mail from people you are in contact with, whereas Other is likely to be mass mailings from companies or websites you have done business with. Outlook can also send large attachments in your e-mails as links to cloud services such as Microsoft’s own OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, or Dropbox.
The last item we discussed was a useful application to consult when something goes wrong on your Mac. One of our members reported getting pop-up messages related to a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device that he no longer owned and wondered where they were coming from. One suggestion I had was to take a look at the log messages in the Console application, found in the Applications:Utilities folder. These are generally pretty cryptic and mainly of interest to software developers, but might give you a clue as to the source of an error you are experiencing.