Clicking an email definitely marks it as read. The calendar schedule not being revealed is a just a privacy option, each person must opt-in to share the exact meeting details.
Having used both gsuite and office I find that they both get job done fairly well
We've done this as far as I know. We also added each other to our directory. I can see the details of other team mate's calendars in the full view but this does not show up in the mini-view when you add a guest to an event.
With Google, when you create a new event and put in a user's email as a guest it immediately showed you a full list of their exact events with times and whether or not they accepted an optional meeting (an outlined or filled circle). It was great to see at a glance while you're in the process of creating the event.
With MS' calendar all you see is a red block of color around the times they are not available.
> Clicking an email definitely marks it as read.
It doesn't for me when using Chrome. When I click into an email the title remains bold and the inbox count doesn't decrease. Keep in mind this is the web app. I didn't install the dedicated app, but I also used the web version of all of Google's tools too.
Only by default, which I believe your org can change. You have complete control over this for your calendar, as does everyone else.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-your-calend...
> When I click into an email the title remains bold and the inbox count doesn't decrease.
Also configurable.
>Also configurable.
Bless you! I had been angsting over this at work for years. I can't believe I didn't think to check the settings.
You just see a big chunk of red with no details. You don't even see things like "busy". It's just a solid red color.
The key is that there are 5 permission levels: (1) None, (2) Can view when I'm busy, (3) Can view titles and locations, (4) Can view all details, and (5) Can edit.
Is that too much control? Maybe, but it's helpful when you want to share more details with teammates than you do with others, grant admins edit permissions, etc.
But nope, it doesn't show any details in the mini view when inviting someone to an event.
Outlook also defaults to not marking messages as unread when the unread filter is on. I presume because profiles were setting the filter and then complaining their messages were disappearing? You can change rose on the same settings page
No need to manually mark it as read.
*EDIT*
Just noticed that there is a setting for this:
Under Options in the webmail you can switch this between:
* Mark as read as soon it has been choosen
* Mark as read after delay in seconds
* Mark as read after selection changes
* Do not mark as read automatically
The default configuration is: * Mark as read after selection changes
Which in my opinion is really weird. I've been using email for 20 years and no other client I've used works this way. It's so inefficient since you need to click into a previously read email to mark a different email as read.
But, I did switch things to mark it as read when chosen which fixes it.
My day and job are based on Microsoft weirdness.
Don't you see how absurd that is in 2023? It's like me saying "Online shops are nice in a pinch, but I advise folks to think of them primarily as viewing goods. In my experience, for any serious shopping you'll want to visit the bricks and mortar shop"
Web tools are always going to be weak vs. locally executing tools. I've never seen one that I prefer to a native equivalent.
Sure, that's a fact which I don't dispute, but that doesn't mean that writing a word document in your browser should be such a bad experience that you really just want to use the web version for viewing documents, which is the absurd thing to which I responded. See, what you say is true, but that doesn't necessarily negate my point if you can agree?
Word is not Photoshop, I expect the web version to be powerful enough to get serious writing done via it.
I understand that POV, but I should temper my "serious work" statement by saying that the Office web apps are pretty great and keep getting better. However, the native desktop apps are just better.
It's hard to make a direct comparison with Google's web-app-only strategy since the Workspace apps are toys in comparison, more akin to Apple's iWork suite.
Being able to write appscript between all the Workplace products was pretty painless.
I haven't tried to push Sheets to do million row fat sheets for crunching but wouldn't be surprised if it does ok
I am using Excel on windows again lately and it is reasonably smooth but boy do I miss Drive + Sheets + collaboration for a 2023 remote workflow
There are billion dollar financial decisions with the most sophisticated financial models being made (rightly or wrongly) using Excel.
I'm sure you have had a bad experience, but saying excel can't handle complex things is not reality.
But once you're in Teams, everything is so much worse, it's like using a hacked version of MS Word to chat. But where Slack actually shines is around the workflows, automation and bots, I don't think Teams has much of that.
@geerlingguy had a way worse experience recently.
It's a garbage product that's slowing even the fastest computers down to a crawl. And don't get me started on all the bugs. Horrible.
You CAN share your calendar details, but most people don't want to. I see this as a feature.
This is configurable, you can make your calendars public and convince your teammates (and potentially the rest of the company) to do so as well.
Nearly everything you’re complaining about can be changed in settings. Either by you or the IT Admin.
and then
> Outlook's web app doesn't even let you click into an email to mark it as read.
Did it occur to you that maybe a few days of use isn't enough for you to understand how to use office? Everything you complained about works fine, even if you don't understand how to do it.
It absolutely does let you do that. I use OWA as my daily driver and that is the behaviour at least on my end. Settings->Mail->Message Handling should have the options you want.
2 days ago a place I'm at switched us from Google mail + calendar + meet to Microsoft outlook + calendar + teams.
I almost can't believe at how good Google's suite of tools are compared to Microsoft. I never used any of MS' office tools until a few days ago.
Outlook's web app doesn't even let you click into an email to mark it as read. You have to explicitly click the mark as read button. It also doesn't support filters with emails that have + in their name (each email ends up being unique instead of Google doing the more expected thing of letting the filter match all + variants). It also doesn't update its title bar with a count of emails in your inbox. That's things I discovered after using it for about 10 minutes.
Microsoft's calendar is designed so poorly, there's so many quality of life things that aren't there vs Google. There's too many to list but the biggest one is not being able to see the calendar details of team mates when inviting them to an event. All you see is a blocked out amount of time, you can't see their exact schedules even if they shared their calendar with you. This removes a huge human element to scheduling meetings because often times I'll avoid scheduling meetings when folks are just getting out of a long meeting, or I'll buffer it by 15-30 minutes depending on who is doing what beforehand.
I'm not not looking forward to the day when we'll need to use all of MS' tools to replace Google docs + spreadsheet and Slack.