Data Fellas

The growth of MS Outlook users is perhaps not fulminant but still steady and very significant. Thus, in 2011, the user base consisted of approximately 360 million people, while in 2018, Microsoft reported 400 million users for the Windows Live Hotmail service. It is really hard to estimate the number of corporate users among these, but a very rough estimate based on some global statistics suggest that the figure could exceed 25%.

MS Outlook

        Interestingly, in the past, there were enough bugs and issues with Outlook which determined a strong competition from other email clients, such as The Bat or Thunderbird. Since mainstream support for Thunderbird was abandoned by Mozilla, users were faced with an insecure future of the application and had to find ways to export Thunderbird to Outlook, namely to transfer the email data, attachments, contacts, etc. to the Microsoft application.

Advantages Of Using Outlook

Below are 10 key advantages of Outlook as compared to other platforms:

• the fact that the entire email database (message bodies, attachments, contacts) is stored offline (on the computer) allows incomparably faster email search, greatly enhancing employee productivity;
• the ability to organize the mail into folders is considered by many users more intuitive compared to grouping by labeling (as adopted by other email clients);
• deep integration of emails with the calendar and contacts;
• organizing email is possible by color coding and by assigning them to one or more categories (calendar event, scheduled task, message, etc.);
• extensive email search possibilities using keywords but also various ways of filtering search results by the location of saving, by email size, the sender, the time range when it could have been received/sent, etc.;
• much better control of the calendar compared to the competition (e.g. control details when sharing calendar events or busy/free schedules with specific individuals);

• the possibility to move emails to folders or assign categories based on a more extensive set of rules (which is better than the limited filtering capabilities of some clients);
• Outlook contact cards contain extensive contact information (address, job title, department, photo, etc.) and even allows to check real-time availability of the client;
• Outlook issues early warnings/tips whenever composing an email destined for a group rather than an individual (helps prevent accidents), but also when the recipient is away on vacation or has enabled automatic responses (saves time);
• the ability to ignore conversations is more simple and intuitive.

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