The trade off lies in the amount of effort marco will spend trying to learn Outlook, understand which resource on the web is wrong, misguided, lying or just out of date, and the level of frustration his (father-in-law?) can bear, as opposed to say, going for a drink and a walk on Thanksgiving. At a certain point just saying I dont know how gives the other person a data point on how much effort their choices will involve. I have wasted days before now trying tofix things I should have simply said "I don't know - its R&D from here on in, these are my rates"