Before reading this post please note that I am only ranting on about my experience with Microsoft from over two years ago, and no doubt a lot has changed since then, and consequently I’ve possibly written some incorrect statements in this post. Please leave a comment below if there is anything you believe I have got wrong or left out.

In a previous post I bagged the crap out of Microsoft Outlook in regards to its lack of ability to be able to export data to a non-proprietary format. I did not include the full story, and Peeps has pointed this out to me. I will endeavour to shed some light on the limitations of Microsoft Outlook.

If you want to move the data to another computer with Microsoft Outlook, this is readily done by moving the PST and OST files, and I have done this in the past. You can even download and install an optional plugin for Microsoft Outlook 2003 to automatically backup these PST and OST files in the event of a catastrophe. So in terms of the ability to be able to back stuff up Outlook is okay.

My concern here is now just how future proof the format in which the data of your contacts, calendar, and mail is stored. Assuming that for whatever reason, lets say the several hundred dollars factor, you can’t afford to use Outlook anymore, and you know this is coming in advance. You could install an alternative open-source software product which is pretty much guaranteed to be future proof and compatible with all standards for years to come, or you could decide to export all your data into a format which can be imported by other software.

In Outlook, it seems that you can in fact export bulk data from Outlook, via the import/export menu:

Clearly we then have to select to export to a file:

I have been able to successfully export an entire calendar and contacts, by doing this process each time for calendar, and then for contacts. You’d think you could export all your email in one hit as well, however it seems not.

Here I had to individually export each of my 17 folders from my PST file into a csv file, one folder at a time, creating 17 csv files. This is hardly a method I find desirable, and clearly impossible for someone with potentially hundreds of top-level folders. My point here is this is cumbersome. Also, by exporting the calendar to a csv file you save all your appointments, and that’s all well and good, although you lose all the relationships of how recurring events occur, and this is what I find annoying. If Microsoft complied with the iCal standard which as far as I’m aware is pretty much as capable as Microsoft’s proprietary format, then the calendar would be able to be read by multiple different software programs. This would give people the opportunity to expand the functionality of their systems. I enjoy the fact that I could at any point in time, uninstall all my software, and have the ability to read my calendar from any calendar system there is.

When I stopped using Outlook a couple years ago, there was pretty much nothing that was capable of reading the proprietary Microsoft calendar files as far as I was aware at the time, and I’m not sure if this has yet changed. This means that without Outlook installed, you cannot access your own personal information.

In summary, I do find Outlook to be highly functional, particularly in the office environment where everyone uses task scheduling correctly. However, for personal use, I am using Thunderbird for my email because I believe it to be more functional, reliable, secure and better performing, whilst using Calendar/Lightning for my calendar. Although the Mozilla Lightning is very much still in development, at least I know that all the recurring event birthdays/anniverseries that I like to keep track of will never be jeopardised by Bill Gates.

Also, I just like to conform with international bloody standards! Someone started an argument with me in a forum over the difference between unlimited and unrestricted ISP plans, and I pointed out that the words are synonyms of each other, so could you please highlight the distinct difference? His response was “well I don’t care what dictionary.com says they mean, this is what *I* mean”. How is this productive when collaborating with others? And how is Microsofts proprietary formats productive when collaborating with others.