At least the two previous versions of Outlook used Word as the default mail editor. This is not new.

The narrow help window is good and bad. It is a good place to put step-by-step instructions. I have been using Outlook 2003 for several months (I had the beta) and have not experienced the IE interactions that you described.


>Outlook 2003 does have a very nice layout compared to the old. But there seems to be other assumptions/processes that are surprises and not so nice.
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>I've already written about (in Office forum) how it uses Word 2003 as the default editor and uses the last instanced window size of Word - be it having been used for a message in Outlook or a document in Word itself - as the size to open it next time regardless of context.
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>This morning I went to use Outlook's Help and one of the things it did all on its own was to overwrite my first writing of THIS MESSAGE as I went back to confirm steps that I had gone through to document my problem here@!#!@#
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>Anyway, as if that wasn't bad enough, it gets worse...
>At least Outlook's Help was in the standard place in the menu bar and its position (first) was as expected. I clicked Help and up popped a new dialogue within the Outlook window and to the far right. That was a little surprise but really OK.
>I typed "delegate" into the entry box and hit Enter. After a few (too many, really) seconds a list of topics of possible interest appeared. I clicked on one and instantly a top-of-screen-to bottom narrowish window appear to the right of theOutlook window. This new window had no menu and 4 buttons on it and was otherwise all blank white space. It seemed it wanted me to do something but I couldn't figure what, so I clikced on a couple of the icons for lack of anything else to 'do'. When nothing happened I went towards the x-box to terminate it when suddenly up popped a bunch of text with a pair of Yes/No buttons at the bottom to related the usefulness of the text above.
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>Obviously all this "help" was coming from the web. To me THIS STINKS! I should at least have been given the option to get my help locally at first, opting to web stuff if I needed/wanted!$@#!$ I did, after all, do a FULL INSTALL of all of Office 2003!
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>Anyway, when retracing the steps to write this I clicked on a different item that came up, this one having a different icon beside it. When I did my UT reply screen (where I'm writing this now) simply disappeared, becoming the web instance for the icon that I had clicked (which, unintuitively, especially when you don't expect it and it doesn't say) was an 'online course')!%!$@^#$!
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>So now I have Help that takes seconds to load from item to item and can randomly take over other windows that I have in use for OTHER ACTIVE PURPOSES!
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>This is progress??? This is good???
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>Not by me!