I actually like Microsoft Office 2007 a lot. While it's not a compelling upgrade for the previous verison of Office, the new interface is nice and easier to use. I'm still struggling with loving Outlook 2007 though.

Don't get me wrong, there's lots to like in Outlook 2007. The calendaring is nice, the IMAP support has improved, you get mobile devices support and the spam filtering, while on the aggressive side, really does work.

I think integrating Outlook with Vista for fast searching will get Microsoft into trouble with the various anti-monopoly regulators around the world, but there's no denying it's useful.

If I could make Outlook 2007 email the way I want it to, I'd use it instead of Thunderbird in fact. But, I can't. Here's what I want:

Unfortunately however, Outlook 2007 lets me do none of the above. It'll create new messages in plain text, but if someone sends an HTML message, it'll respond in that format. I can probably fix that by turning off HTML completely, but that's a hack.

Outlook 2007 steadfastly refuses to start message responses at the bottom however. I remember from earlier versions that it was possible to tell it to just that, but Outlook 2007 seems to have ditched that ability. Which is odd, because Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail let you do it.

In order to make Outlook 2007 behave, you have to code. Yes, code. And in VBA too. Dominik Jain's Outlook Quotefix was the saviour for previous versions of Outlook, but it doesn't work yet with 2007.

I'm trying to get the macro from The Urgists to work in Outlook 2007, but so far it won't run.

What I don't get is why oh why Microsoft can't let us have the above features which are actually necessary in some situations, like posting to busy mailing lists? Putting in hacky VBA macros to fix it seems silly.