Tuesday, I had lunch with J. LeRoy. 

He probably doesn’t remember it this way, but he convinced me to make the switch to Office 2007.  It went something like this:

Jim (All paraphrased):

• I have finally given up on Outlook.
• I’m sick of waiting for five minutes for it to start.
• It never closes when you click on the ‘x’.
• Business Contacts Manager constantly asked me to reinstall its database.
• Which database is that?  I remember installing a database.

and the one that convinced me:

• It does some really cool things with tasks (and follow-up).

That was it.  I had to install it.

Having the tools to manage my to-do list efficiently is kind of my Holy Grail. I have tried various tools and not been happy with any of them.  So I have fallen back to using tasks in Outlook which are synchronized with my Treo.

This works okay, but Outlook 2003 treats tasks as some kind of afterthought.

Outlook 2007 is a much better job with providing a usable UX integrating tasks (and the calendar) across many different views.

And for me, it doesn’t take very long to start.  It also closes when I click on the ‘x’.   I suspect that Jim is having add-in trouble.  Something (probably Business Contacts Manager) is keeping Outlook alive when it shouldn’t.

Now, I’m using the entire Office Ultimate suite.  More on that as I actually start to use it.