It’s been a year since the new Outlook has been available to users in production as an opt-in preview. And what a year it has been! Your feedback has been invaluable to us and has helped us prioritize features that were most important to you. We’ve added key missing features, improved the user experience, quality, & craftsmanship. And now, we are very excited to announce that with the mid-February release of Outlook for Mac, it will become our recommended default experience for both new & existing users! We are very eager to have you try it out so you can experience the best of Outlook on macOS. However, the switch will continue to be available, so you can switch back if you so desire. The change will not apply to users who use Microsoft Exchange on-premises.
It’s all about craftsmanship and personalization
When you launch Outlook for the first time or transition from the classic version of Outlook, you will be greeted by our new onboarding and personalization flow. Here, you can configure how Outlook looks & behaves, choose between light, dark, or automatic modes. We’ve even introduced themes to add that touch of color to brighten your Outlook!
As you flow through the onboarding process, you will also be able to configure density & text size preferences. These settings affect the space between text and items, and you can see the changes live in Outlook! It’s the same with text sizes too. And finally, under personalization, you can set how you would like to preview your emails. On the right, bottom, or in a new window? The choice is yours! The new onboarding flow also helps you customize the toolbar, with the tools that you use the most. This applies to all the toolbars in the main window, and the read and compose windows! We’ve also worked hard on craftsmanship and motion, to make transitions feel beautiful and Outlook feel fluid.
Everything that’s old is new again!
We loved the feedback that you gave us, and it helped us prioritize the right set of features and functionality. In search, for example, we recognize that a powerful tool is a key to getting things done quickly and efficiently. Our new search is faster and has many intelligent features like natural language, enhanced search suggestions, and speller. Search helps you find contextually relevant information, to help you get things done and connect with people faster.
We’ve added an activity feed in the Mail module to give you a quick glance at colleagues that have mentioned you in emails and documents. And soon, you will be able to react to emails, and see reactions to your emails in the same activity feed.
Use Online Archive? Want to compose an email in its own window? The new Outlook for Mac supports both! Online Archive was one of the topmost requested features, and it is now rolling out in production! You can move messages from primary mailbox or use retention policies to archive the messages automatically.
We’ve also added support for text predictions to help you along when composing emails. And coming soon, at long last, the ability to view and configure retention policies for emails and meetings, along with improvements to Microsoft Information Protection labels, like default & mandatory labeling, auto & recommended labeling, label auditing & more!
To help you manage your time, we’ve added support for shortened events as recent research proves that even small breaks between meetings can have a positive impact on our stress levels, and on our ability to focus and engage in meetings. Ever wanted to see the working hours of your colleagues when scheduling a meeting? Now you can! Just open the scheduling assistant when creating a meeting, and it will now show the working hours of the attendees! Support for importing ICS files is already available and coming soon is the ability to export ICS files, move, and copy events.
And finally, to help you manage your contacts, we added the ability to import and export VSF files, synch contact folders as categories, and contact card for Groups. We’ve even enhanced contact cards for people to include files and meetings that are related to that contact. Just click on a contact, to see relevant emails and meetings with that person. All available in one neat location!
Also, we know you’ve been waiting for it, support for personal contact groups is coming soon!
What’s next?
We continue to add more features, like support for Microsoft Exchange on-premises servers, the ability to import local data, and more. Be sure to check out the Office for Mac and iPad Technical Skilling session here - aka.ms/skillingsessions/OfficeExperience. Try out all these new features and more, as it brings much requested updates across Mail, Search, Calendar, and People. Please do give us feedback, via Help > Give Feedback, as we are listening! To report a bug, go to Help > Contact Support, and our agents are standing by to help you out!
Enterprise users can also contact Microsoft Premiere support to report issues.
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