Ask Paul: September 7 (Premium)

Happy Friday and Happy September everyone. Here’s another round of questions and answers to kick off the new month.

Outlook, oh I have questions

johnlavey asks:

Paul, can you explain the differences between The Outlook which is part of Office 365, Outook.com, Outlook.live.com on the Web, etc. etc. etc. Right now I am using Outlook.live.com in Beta version, which I love, yet occasionally the Outlook that comes with Office 365 pops up which I don’t love. I probably also failed to mention a few other versions.

Microsoft uses the Outlook name on a lot of different products and services, most of which are actually different from each other technologically. Among them:

Outlook.com. This is the successor to Hotmail and is Microsoft’s consumer service for email, calendar, and contacts (and tasks), and is tied to your Microsoft account. (Outlook.live.com and Outlook.com are the same thing.) It’s gone through at least three major user interface design changes since Microsoft first used the Outlook.com brand, but as far as its technological underpinning go, this is currently unclear with regards to how it compares to…

Outlook on the Web. This is the successor to Exchange Online and it Microsoft’s business/commercial solution for email, calendar, and contacts (and tasks). In other words, it is to Office 365 commercial what Outlook.com is to consumers (and to Office 365 Personal and Home). Outlook on the Web and Outlook.com seem to be on similar trajectories from a design perspective, and this service has been likewise updated, UX-wise, several times over the years. But, again, it’s not clear how much of the technical underpinnings of Outlook.com and Outlook on the Web are similar/identical. Given their histories, I’d guess not much.

Outlook 2016/2019 for Windows. The “flagship” Outlook client has been around in desktop app form since 1997, though a previous application, called Schedule+ predates that (and didn’t offer email capabilities). This is what I think of when I hear the word “Outlook,” and this client is big, powerful, and complex.

Outlook 2016/2019 for Mac. The Mac desktop version of Outlook has gotten more similar to its Windows counterpart in recent years but it is, in fact, a very different application. Same theory, though: Full-featured functionality for the desktop in native application form.

Outlook Mobile. The Android and iOS versions of Outlook were originally created by a company called Accompli, which Microsoft purchased in 2014. Outlook Mobile is kind of a unique mobile app in that it provides email and calendar management in a single app (rather than in two separate apps), and I think that was part of the appeal for Microsoft: It worked much like Outlook on the desktop. (It also integrates with third-party apps and services, which furthers this comparison.)

Microsoft Mail and Calendar (and People) in Windows 10. These mobile apps ship with Windows 10 and while they lack the Outlook brand, they started life as the Outlook solutions on Windows phone and are now managed by the same group in Microsoft that is improving all the other Outlook versions. These apps, especially Mail, are by far the worst of the lot from a functionality/feature-completeness perspective, but Microsoft inexplicably believes them to be showcases for how modern Windows 10 apps should look and work. (They are also part of the Outlook Support Center in case you’re dubious of their heritage.)

When Microsoft consolidated all Outlook app/service development under a single group, I had hoped that we would seem them be literally consolidated into a single code base or, at least, as close as would be possible. But that doesn’t seem to be happening. And these things are all different animals, so to speak, as listed here. Only Outlook for Android and Outlook for iOS are reasonably identical across platforms.

As for the actual differences between each of these things, documenting that would be a life-long, frustrating effort. It’s still confusing to me when one particular Outlook client doesn’t support one particular feature that is available elsewhere in this “family” of products. As you note and realize, this situation is a mess.

One additional thing to think about here, I guess, is that Outlook.com and Outlook for the web are both email services in addition to being clients. That means they are associated with an email address and that you cannot “add” other email addresses to the account (beyond basic forwarding), as you can with clients like Outlook 2016/2019, Outlook or Mobile, or Windows Mail.

Why are there so many versions of Outlook?

They were all created separately and at different times.

How can I organize Windows so that only Outlook.live.com is available and how do I ignore/get rid of the versions I don’t like?

Well. 🙂 In Windows 10 specifically, you can just ignore Windows Mail, as I do, and use Outlook.com (Outlook.live.com) on the web if that’s what you wish to do. Getting rid of Mail in Windows 10 isn’t impossible. But I don’t think it’s worth the effort.

If you have Outlook 2016 installed as part of Office, likewise you can simply ignore it (as I do). Here again, removal is difficult: With Office 365 (consumer or commercial), Microsoft doesn’t provide a way to choose which applications are installed or not when you install the suite (Windows or Mac).

Also: will Microsoft eventually combine all these versions with formatting and features most people want?

To be fair to Microsoft, they are trying to make each Outlook client as functionally similar as does make sense. It is reasonable that the Windows Mail client, for example, will never be as full-featured as the email capabilities in Outlook 2016. But yes, the differences are staggering and often frustrating.

Fat vs. low-fat/no fat

Usman asks:

In a podcast you mentioned that butter is healthier than margarine and whole milk is healthier than skimmed/semi-skimmed milk. What about those products makes it healthier and why do we assume the opposite is true?

As another reader suggested, it’s because fat can’t make you fat. Assuming, of course, you’re not eating that fat with a starch or other carbohydrate. In which case the fat becomes more problematic.

One of the issues with understanding nutrition is that we’ve been programmed to believe things that are wrong: Fat is bad for you, eggs are unhealthy, orange juice is healthy, etc.

But fat doesn’t make you fat and you can eat as much of it as you want. Again, assuming you don’t mix it with carbohydrates (bread, potatoes, etc.). The problem with butter, for example, is that people usually do consume it with carbs. With milk, this is not usually the case: I consume whole milk only with coffee.

Alternate web browsers

Cdorf asks:

I’m curious if you’ve revisited your browser testing that you were doing there around the time of your home swap? With your latest article about the inconsitencies of Edge I’m guessing you’ve distanced yourself more from that. Both FF and Chrome updated this week and Brave seems to be chugging along quite nicely. I’ve been testing Brave on and off since they came into existence but haven’t found them as a suitable replacement for Firefox.

Not formally. But every time a browser is updated, I do go back and start using it again so I can see whether it warrants a deeper look. The one that struck me this week was Firefox: The text rendering in this browser is dramatically better now and is on par with that of Microsoft Edge. (Which, despite its other issues, has always been tops for the look of text.)

Anyway, this is something I do regularly. But not to the degree I had hoped to do previously. I just run into too many blockers when I don’t use Chrome.

Microsoft Songsmith

Daninbusiness asks:

Microsoft Songsmith. Per Wikipedia, that came out nearly 10 years ago!!! Any thoughts or reflections on this?

It is, in fact, still available. Perhaps a theme song for the podcast with Brad? 🙂

Wow. 🙂

I had completely forgotten about this. It’s worth checking out, especially the cringe-inducing video.

Microsoft Edge and Windows 10

MartinusV2 writes:

I got depressed after reading your article Microsoft Edge is What’s Wrong with Windows 10 … What can we do to let Microsoft know that we find these UI inconsistencies are not acceptable any more?

What I can do about this kind of thing is what I did do: Write an article that highlights the problem with the hope and understanding that people at Microsoft read it, which they do, and will act on it. Which … they do only sometimes.

What you can do is use the Feedback Hub in Windows 10 to point out these inconsistencies and issues one by one and hope that your feedback is up-voted and reaches the team(s) responsible. Obviously, you should make sure someone hasn’t already posted about the issue you’re not.

Unfortunately, Microsoft’s track record here is not great. As I wrote in Windows 10 at 3: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, for all of Microsoft’s telemetry/feedback data, it has done a poor job of acting on that data by “finishing the job” across the OS. I’m hoping that this year’s regime change will lead to improvements in this area, and that no longer chasing nonsense features will trigger a rethink in the types of improvements that can/should be made. It doesn’t help that the Windows Insider Program, a key driver for functional changes to Windows, is driven by an overly-engaged minority of enthusiasts who in no way represent the broader Windows user base or their needs. The whole thing is a mess.

Health wearables

dcdevito asks:

Paul, have you written anything lately on health wearable devices? If not, do you plan on doing so in the near future? Thanks

I think so. A couple of recent developments:

I did preorder the Fitbit Charge 3, which would replace my current tracker, a Fitbit Alta. If I follow-through on this, it will arrive in October. It has a few advantages over my current Fitbit, like heart rate tracking and an oxygen sensor. But I’m not sure if I need those things, honestly.

I’ve also enabled Google Fit on both of my phones. (I had been walking in the morning with the OnePlus 6, but I bought a cheap pair of Bluetooth wireless headphones and am back to the Pixel 2 XL.) This app is really interesting because it tracks walks and other exercises with a(n inaccurate) map, which I kind of miss from Microsoft Band. And it’s good for tracking things like blood pressure, weight, activities, and workouts. So I’ve been kind of using it alongside the Fitbit. (They don’t share data, which is stupid.)

I will always pay attention to what Apple does with Apple Watch, and it’s interesting to me that this device has emerged as a first-rate health and fitness tracker. I don’t have other smartwatch ambitions beyond this kind of tracking per se. But I suppose it would be freeing to leave the phone at home when I’m walking and still be able to listen to audiobooks or podcasts. Never say never.

Surface and the NFL

ericmeetsworld asks:

Thoughts, is it the last season for the NFL Surface Deal? Over/Under on how many times they call it an iPad this year?

I’ve always been confused by this partnership: Microsoft pays millions of dollars per year for this advertising and it has to provide special impact covers for each Surface because the devices would never withstand the abuse otherwise.

So here’s the thing. Let’s say Microsoft doesn’t want to continue paying for this exposure. My guess is that the NFL would switch instantly to the iPad because that’s what everyone really wants to use. (And I bet to this day that some players and coaches still believe they’re using now.) You can outfit an iPad with a protective cover just as easily as you can a Surface.

I expect Microsoft to continue paying, if only because losing the deal, especially if Apple didn’t pay to make it happen, would be humiliating.

Outlook.com vs. Outlook on the web

davidD asks:

In relation to recent Office changes, I’ve noticed references to Outlook on the web. Is this something different to Outlook.com?

Yes, and this is an interesting coincidence as there is a long conversation about this topic at the beginning of this article.

Short version: Outlook on the Web is like Outlook.com but for Office 365 commercial (business) customers. They’re not identical, but they are similar.

New PC, reinstall Windows 10

maethorechannen asks:

I’ve just got a new laptop from Dell, and I’m wondering if I should reinstall Windows as I’m having 2 related issues.

The first problem I’m having is that the useless games I’ve never asked for in the start menu (Candy Crush, Minecraft, a few others) won’t go away. They don’t seem to actually be installed – there’s no uninstall option and if you click on them nothing happens (it doesn’t even bring up the Store, let alone the app). If I install the apps from the store and then uninstall them they come back as soon as I reboot.

The second problem is that in the tiles region there’s about a dozen down arrows that don’t even indicate what “great new app” is supposed to be being installed. If I remove them they reappear at reboot.

All of the in-box games should be uninstallable: Right-click anywhere in Start and choose “Uninstall.” That you’re not seeing this is not right.

The down-arrow tiles are placeholders and those should fully install over time. So this, too, is not right.

The first thing I would try is to create a new local account on the PC with admin privileges (Settings > Accounts > Family & other users > Add someone else to this PC.) Sign out of your current account. Then sign-in to the new account.

After it comes up, open Store and navigate to See more (the “…” menu) > Downloads and updates and click “Get updates.” Let the Store update whatever giant list of apps it should update.

When that’s done, look at Start. Can you remove the in-box games? Are the placeholder tiles gone? If so, there’s just something wrong with the (local version of) the user account you first used. So you could remove it (from the new account) and then convert the new local account to that Microsoft account (assuming that’s what you were using.)

If this doesn’t fix the issue then, yes, I’d reinstall. I don’t believe that Dell or any other PC maker has the ability to actually prevent you from removing in-box games. But you can always use the Fresh start feature (which is now in Windows Security, not Settings) to grab a clean copy of Windows 10 from the Internet and install that instead of the Dell image. You will probably want to grab whatever Dell’s support utility is later so you can get firmware and driver updates.

Cord-cutting

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

Any update with regard to cord cutting? I am getting more than fed up with Verizon’s monthly charges, especially for hardware, which cannot be purchased. I am wondering though, if I can actually get the cost down when adding in the various services.

Cord-cutting is something I will return to again and again, yes. I’ve not made any real changes since my last post, but with the fall TV season kicking in soon, I’ll be looking at this again. We don’t watch a lot of network/basic cable TV, so I’d like to keep this as inexpensive as possible. What we’ve really learned from cord-cutting is how unnecessary cable TV really is.

With regards to your actual question, yes, you can lower your monthly outlay by cord-cutting. But my take on this is that there are better reasons to do so than just saving money. Once you remove cable TV from the equation and adopt some combination of services, you are free to move along on a monthly basis when prices or features change. In other words, for pure TV, you might be using YouTube TV and notice that Sling TV, or DirectTV Now, or whatever, is cheaper/better for you because of some change and switching is a zero-friction affair. Switching from cable, or from one cable service to another is a nightmare. So just do it once and be free.

Why can’t you uninstall the in-box apps in Windows 10?

SherlockHolmes asks:

Why doesent Microsoft allow to uninstall the bundled UWP Apps in Windows 10 easily. I know you can uninstakll them using Powershell but a normal PC user doesent know this or dont want to do that.

Yep.

When it comes to “why” questions, I can usually only speculate. In this case, I believe it’s tied to the notion of what Windows 10 is, if that makes sense. And Microsoft has gone back and forth on this. Windows Vista introduced a bunch of in-box applications, and then Microsoft removed them from Windows 7 and put them in Windows Live Essentials so that they could be updated more frequently. With Windows 8 and now Windows 10, they sidestep this problem because those apps (with the exception of Microsoft Edge) can be updated regularly through the Microsoft Store.

If you look at other modern operating systems—Android and iOS, for sure, and to a lesser degree the Mac or even Linux—you’ll usually find a similar mix of in-box apps, some of which can be removed and/or hidden and some of which cannot. There are probably valid technical reasons for this. But more common, I think, the companies that make these platforms are trying to lock users into the defaults—many people never bother to look for alternatives—and thus to paid services. A Windows 10 Mail user may later upgrade to Office 365, and they are more likely to use OneDrive, which is integrated, than find and pay for a third-party service.

Outlook.com Premium

helix2301 asks:

Paul has Microsoft ever released numbers for premium outlook users?

No, Microsoft has always been very quiet about Outlook.com Premium. But my suspicion is that the service was canceled because managing it was prohibitively expensive, not because there wasn’t an interested customer base.

If Microsoft not financing surface hardware how is the computer as a server that they keep talking about going to work or is that something different all together? its confusing.

I feel like Surface Plus, the recently-canceled consumer financing program, will come back, and I suspect the issue wasn’t participation but rather a desire to consolidate these operations with other hardware financing programs like Xbox All Access. We’ll see.

I’m not sure what you mean by computer as a server, but Microsoft certainly has an agnostic view with regards to what hardware/devices that its customers use. Maybe this just isn’t a priority for them.

Headphones

donald0 asks:

I’m curious if you have any final thoughts on the Libratone Q Adapt earphones you were test driving in April. Inquiring mind(s) wanna know.

I returned them because they are incompatible with non-Google phones. I hate lock-in. And because they weren’t very good. More recently, I tried to throw more money at my Pixel problems by test-driving two expensive pairs of wireless Bose headphones. Which I also returned.

So this past week, I purchased a pair of AUKEY Latitude Wireless Headphones from Amazon. They’re just $27, about one-tenth the cost of the first Bose wireless headphones I tried. Are they as good? No. But they are one-tenth the cost. And they are good enough. Good enough for my daily walks. So I will keep these.