(New) Outlook 2016 | macOS Big Sur | Office 365 | Slooooow

[ArsE82]

Does anyone else use this combination with the 'New' interface in Outlook 2016? Is it useable? I have to switch it back to the old view for it to be usable which is awful.

Macbook Air M1 - 16GB RAM

Just generally slow when scrolling through individual emails, sometimes lagging when composing replies etc. Doing my head in!

[mmm-five]

I'm guessing Office 2016 isn't running native on Apple Silcon, so that will be causing some of the slow down - especially if MS have tacked some new baubles on without considering user experience (which is their normal modus operandi).

[edeath]

Office 365 is M1 native now but you may need to uninstall then reinstall it if you installed prior to December 2020 I think.

[ArsE82]

mmm-five said:

I'm guessing Office 2016 isn't running native on Apple Silcon, so that will be causing some of the slow down - especially if MS have tacked some new baubles on without considering user experience (which is their normal modus operandi).

Office has been optimised for M1 for a while now apparently!

[mmm-five]

ArsE82 said:

Office has been optimised for M1 for a while now apparently!

I know that's true for Office 2019 or Office 365...but you say you have Office 2016.

Office 2016 support ceased almost a year ago (October 2020), so don't expect any updates to fix anything (security or features).

MS would much prefer you either pay £150 every few years for the standalone versions (i.e. 2001, 2004, 2008, 2011, 2016, 2019 for Mac or ) or buy their 365 subscription (£70/year for 5 computers) both of which are updated regularly.

The only real difference is the 365 subscription doesn't have an end-of-life date whereas the 2019 version will (probably late 2013/early 2014).

---

Anyway, ignoring that for now as it shouldn't matter...Microsoft does have a history of putting form over function on the Mac, and I remember when they decided to put a 'fancy' transition effect into Excel, so that every time you moved down/across a row/column it made the outline of the cell 'slide' to the next entry.

Looked very nice...but what would normally take a 100th of a second to do now took 1/2 a second - and got really annoying really quickly. It only took them 6 months to revert (or offer an option to disable them).

I'm wondering whether there's some optional animation added to the new look, or whether they've just messed the coding up...again!

Edited by mmm-five on Monday 13th September 16:45