J
Jeff T
Are newsgroups available in Outlook?
G
Good Guy
No.
V
VanguardLH
Jeff said:
No, not *in* Outlook. Corporations don't want that feature and that
market is Microsoft's biggest Outlook customer. At best, you can get an
add-on, like Newshound which is payware, that emulates NNTP support by
reusing the folder structure inside of Outlook. Typically Newshound
users find it too weak a client solution and end up finding something
else. At one time, there was a menu choice in Outlook to Go To
newsgroups but that didn't do newsgroups inside of Outlook. Instead it
called whatever was the default handler for NNTP, like Outlook Express.
So the newsgroups menu entry in Outlook merely started another program.
Presumably when you said "Outlook" that you meant Outlook. Outlook and
Outlook Express are NOT a family of products, they are unrelated,
Outlook Express is not a light version of Outlook. They are completely
different programs, like Word and WordPerfect are separate programs.
K
Ken Blake, MVP
No. No version of Outlook has ever provided newsreading capability..
J
J. P. Gilliver (John)
Though at least one version of Outlook (I think one of the ones previous"Ken Blake said:
to 2003) used Outlook Express in a way that seemed pretty seamless to
me; another has said that it actually used whatever was the default news
client, which may have been the case, but I certainly found it well
linked, to the extent that I wouldn't have known I wasn't using Outlook
for news. [On my works machine. Until the blocked news access
altogether. )-:]
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf
I'm sometimes a bit bewildered by that, really - there are no young people in
it, there's no sex, there's no violence, no car chases and there's no action
and no vampires. - Colin Firth on the success of the film "The King's Speech".
Radio Times 10-16 September 2011
K
Ken Blake, MVP
A very minor comment: Outlook and Outlook Express are from the same
company--Microsoft--and it almost seemed like Microsoft worked very
hard to confuse people by giving two such similar names to two such
dissimilar products. But Word and WordPerfect are by two different
companies, and WordPerfect preceded Microsoft Word.
K
Ken Blake, MVP
Yes, Outlook invoked Outlook Express if you asked it to read
newsgroups. The result was that *many* people thought Outlook had
newsreading capability even though it didn't. Another example of
Microsoft's unnecessarily confusing people.
V
VanguardLH
Actually Microsoft bought Outlook Express. It was first called
"Internet Mail & News" (hence the "imn" still in the executable file's
name). The only immediate change upon acquisition by Microsoft was to
change the trademark and copyright strings in the program to reflect
"Microsoft". It's been 17 years since Microsoft acquired IMN so I don't
remember the original developer/owner. I only remember upon hearing the
original author's or company's name that my reaction was "Who are they?"
That was before Google existed so forget about finding info online.
Later Microsoft decided to change the "Internet Mail & News" to "Outlook
Express" to roll it under a "family" of e-mail clients but only confused
users into thinking that OE was a light version of Outlook.
Look at the mess Microsoft has made in the naming of the local e-mail
clients bundled with Windows and the naming for their online services.
Sure looks like their marketers do LSD too often and at the wrong time.
Microsoft has a penchant for forgetting their own history.
V
VanguardLH
A side-effect of that confusion is that users thought they had to load
Outlook to then use its menu to pick "Newsgroups". Instead the users
could've speeded up the load of Internet Mail & News aka Outlook Express
by using a desktop or taskbar shortcut to directly load that NNTP
client.
K
Ken Blake, MVP
Yes, good point.
M
micky
Yes, you beat me to saying something similar.
And they both deal with words, so the names make sense. Esp. since
Word was probably trying to trade on WordPerfect's good reputation.
What either of the first two have to do with Outlooks is anyone's
guess.
There are also Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer. Not nearly as
annoying except when people tell newbies to use Explorer for something
and don't say which.
Reading in this thread all the other problems MS caused, I wonder if
they designed Obamacare. Just this September, MS sent out an update
for Word and Starter Word that screwed up associations for many users
of Starter Word and some users of Word, then gave bad advice on how to
fix it for at least 3 days that just made things worse.
M
micky
I don't know. Maybe. I only had Works once for a few days and I
looked at the choices iirc but never used any.
Starter Word is sometimes part of Starter Office. The currently
downloadable version is part of Starter Office but the only other part
provided is the spreadsheet (I don't know if there was ever a more
comprehensive version or not) I think either way, it's an OEM
program (maybe based on Word or Office) provided by MS to OEMs, and
installed and maintained by HP and a couple other OEMs. Most versions
are paid for by advertising** but my brother's wasn't. It had no
ads. It had the strip of optoins along the top, which makes me
think it was based on Word. And apparently if it's ever uninstalled,
it can only be reinstalled if the OEM cooperates with you, and they
often or always don't. Although maybe if you already had ads, the
downloadable version is just as good.
If I sound confused it's cause I am.
** (but it still works when off the net, I'm sure. It's just that the
advertising either doesn't change, or it changes within a set of ads
that were already downloaded. That's the way the ad-paid version of
Eudora worked. )
J
J. P. Gilliver (John)
Bill in Co said:
Nothing built-in, no. There are third-party addins - I use one - that,
for example, give you the old menus back.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf
No. I typed <rant> several years ago.
(Alisdair Wren and Stuart Brady, August/September 1998.)
J
J. P. Gilliver (John)
In message <[email protected]>, Bill in Co
Works were nobbled because it was eating into Office's market: as you
say, by version 4.x, it was quite good, certainly adequate for a lot of
the word processing (and other office tasks) that a moderate sized
business might require. (Also, if you're really paranoid and believe in
the alleged pact between MS and the hardware manufacturers, Works was a
lot less demanding of resources.)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf
No. I typed <rant> several years ago.
(Alisdair Wren and Stuart Brady, August/September 1998.)
I still contend that the small team inside Microsoft who were developing
Works were nobbled because it was eating into Office's market: as you
say, by version 4.x, it was quite good, certainly adequate for a lot of
the word processing (and other office tasks) that a moderate sized
business might require. (Also, if you're really paranoid and believe in
the alleged pact between MS and the hardware manufacturers, Works was a
lot less demanding of resources.)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf
No. I typed <rant> several years ago.
(Alisdair Wren and Stuart Brady, August/September 1998.)
J
J. P. Gilliver (John)
"Ken Blake said:
You can choose to think that if you wish; I found it convenient.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf
No. I typed <rant> several years ago.
(Alisdair Wren and Stuart Brady, August/September 1998.)
V
VanguardLH
Bill said:I've got one used XP computer (a laptop) that came with Office 2007
installed on it. I just couldn't "take" the ribbon - what an incredible
waste of desktop (laptop in my case) screen space!! So I tried out both
UBitMenu and Office Classic Menu. Either one helps immensely, but it's
still not quite as clean as not having had the ribbon at all, like in the
previous versions. Whose "bright" idea was that? (nevermind).
You could hide the menu; however, these add-ons don't provide a new
toolbar but add a ribbon tab to the ribbon bar. So using these add-ons
means having to click on the ribbon tab to show their classic menus. So
you could recover screen space by hiding the ribbon bar and only show it
when you need to see the classic menus (when you don't just use the
keyboard shortcuts to eliminate having to use menus except for rare-used
features).
V
VanguardLH
Bill said:
My aunt had an ancient version of MS Office (97, I think). She didn't
want to put that on her laptop nor did she want to pay for MS Office.
So I put Kingsoft Suite Free on her laptop and she loves it. I played
with it for awhile, too, and it's pretty good. You can choose a menu
theme that is very close to the pre-2007 versions of MS Office to reduce
the learning curve.
She's got some Microsoft certification for MS Office (probably paid for
by her company) but, so far, she found the Kingsoft freebie to handle
all her home-use needs. She didn't like LibreOffice as she needed to do
some doc work right now and couldn't waste time with the learning curve
for LibreOffice, plus she already knew as did I that some Word-matching
features are buried in some goofy workarounds. She checked out tables
and lots of other features in Kingsoft to ensure it would be usable to
her. She was intrigued with the native UI of Kingsoft but time demands
required she switch to the MS-style menus so she could start working
immediately on her docs.
V
VanguardLH
J. P. Gilliver (John) said:
Really? It was more speedy to wait for Outlook to load to then use its
menus to separately load Outlook Express than to use a shortcut on the
Windows desktop or in a toolbar in the taskbar to just click and load
Outlook Express?
- Load Outlook.
- Wait for Outlook to get ready.
- Click on the Go To link in the menu bar.
- Click on the Newsgroups entry in that menu.
- Load Outlook Express.
- Wait for Outlook Express to get ready.
versus
- Click on Outlook Express shortcut in toolbar in Windows taskbar.
- Load Outlook Express.
- Wait for Outlook Express to get ready.
Even if you have Outlook already loaded and leave it loaded all the
time, drilling through the menus is still a bit more effort than
clicking on a shortcut button in a taskbar toolbar. With Outlook
already running:
- Click on the Go To link in the menu bar.
- Click on the Newsgroups entry in that menu.
- Load Outlook Express.
- Wait for Outlook Express to get ready.
versus
- Click on Outlook Express shortcut in toolbar in Windows taskbar.
- Load Outlook Express.
- Wait for Outlook Express to get ready.
Yeah, with Outlook already loaded, it's just 1 more click in the menu
but it's still more. For the News menu to work in Outlook required the
NNTP association pointed at Outlook Express. Do an online search and
you'll see users reporting the News menu entry was missing until they
changed the program associations back to Outlook Express. If you used a
different NNTP client and made it the default, you couldn't call the
alternate or replacement NNTP client from inside of Outlook. As I
recall, setting Outlook Express as the default newsgroups program in the
Programs tab in Internet Options might still not get a News entry in
Outlook's Go To menu or it didn't work. That was because there was yet
another default program setting for users of the Fischer Price
bobblehead desktop theme which has its own settings for the default and
newsgroups client. So some users had to change the default in 2 places.
With a shortcut in a toolbar (e.g., Quicklaunch or your own), there was
no configuration elsewhere to start the correct NNTP program, no
associations to screw up, and you didn't have to fix a missing or
unusable News entry in Outlook's Go To menu.
V
VanguardLH
Bill said:
I figure your eyes must move off the document and upward to the top of
the window to see the ribbon bar. So I also figure it would be trivial
when moving your eyes off the document to click on a tab for the
otherwise hidden ribbon bar to uncollapse it. Using the classic menus
(if they were there), using classic menus in a ribbon toolbar tab, or
using the ribbon toolbar means interrupting your focus of the document
to move your eyes upward.
Since you must interrupt your focus to look up, I figure collapsing the
ribbon bar when you're not looking at it would give back the screen
space you complained the ribbon bar was sucking up.
V
VanguardLH
Bill said:I find collapsing and not collapsing the large ribbon bar a nuisance. With
the old system, the menus were always there AND took up very little space.
That was the best option, IMHO (and I know many others felt the same way,
given all the "fallout" since Office 2007 (and later) came on the horizon.
One feature I do like about Word 2007 is the ability to save a doc as a PDF
file if desired, however. I'll concede that point.
was wise enough to give the option to set the default Word save option to
.doc OR .docx.
But the "menus" were just a menu bar: a single row of tab labels. None
of those tab labels did anything. You still had to click on a tab in
the menubar to bring down a menu and look for an entry on which to
click. So how is that different from squashing the ribbon so only its
tabs show? Alas, yes, with Ubitmenu and others, you end up having to
click twice to bring down a classic menu: click once to open the
ribbon's tab and then click in the classic menubar to bring down that
menu to finally get at the entries. So you end up with one additional
click.
Leaving the ribbon shown means eliminating that one extra click. Must
be that one extra click is worse than "what an incredible waste of
desktop screen space" to keep the ribbon shown. So one extra click
isn't a solution for you. As for "the menus were always there AND took
up very little space", that's still true by hiding the ribbon.
I'm not defending Microsoft's choice of ribbon, just addressing what I
thought you thought was the worst offense in wasting screen space by
showing the ribbon. The first thing I did to tweak Office 2010 was to
hide the ribbon bar. Yep, it wastes too much space. I'm on the fence
about Ubitmenu, the Office Classic Menus add-on, and addintools but if I
installed one of them I'd still leave the ribbon as hidden. It's just
one click away from the hidden ribbon (that still shows its tabs just
like the old classic menubar) to dropdown the menus from the menubar.
While I would uninstall Office 2010 to go back to the classic UI for
Office 2003, the newer versions are must faster. Excel spreadsheets can
not only be over 100 times larger but they load a lot faster and cells
with formulae complete much faster even on the same old hardware. Huge
Word docs load faster, reformat faster, search faster, and everything
faster. It's the ribbon that slows the user and having to dig around
finding features. So I'll keep Office 2010 but I might install one of
those classic menu add-ons so I can get back up to speed with the
addition of just 1 tab click to open the "classic menu" tab in the
ribbon bar. Faster, access to classic menus with little extra effort,
and I can later learn the ribbon UI a little at a time.