Based on the response I received from readers of my recent second look at Microsoft Office 2007, I should give you in-depth second looks on several of the Office applications. Today we start with Outlook 2007, again comparing it with the version found in the Office 2003 suite.

Outlook 2007 is one of the weaker applications in Office 2007. At times I get so frustrated with its slow response and idiosyncrasies that I'm tempted to uninstall it and go back to Outlook 2003. Readers also have frustrations.

One unidentified reader told me his organization of contacts became less valuable when he went from Outlook 2003 to 2007. Originally he used categories to display his contacts in his preferred order, and he organized them within those categories by last name. But when he upgraded to Outlook 2007, the software applied its newer color-coded category system, and he would have needed to change every entry manually to get it back to where he wanted it.

I too was surprised when installing Outlook 2007 that it applied its own color-coding scheme. I thought it was a nice idea at first but have encountered problems with it because it changed the colors of my existing items to a color code that Microsoft automatically applied. The Microsoft method used colors that were very close to one another and assigned them alphabetically by the name of the category. In essence, it wiped out my useful color scheme to replace it with a poorly designed one in which I can't always tell the category by color because the colors are often indistinguishable. Additionally, it took more than an hour to apply those colors when I first upgraded.

There is a way to get around the color coding/categorization problem using automatic formatting, but I have found that it doesn't work on all views, and it still takes time to set up.

Another reader, William Lefkovics, pointed out that even though Outlook 2007 doesn't use the Office Ribbon in its main window, it does use it in 19 other places -- more than any other Office 2007 application. That's good, because the use of the Office Ribbon in Outlook 2007 is much more intuitive than in the other Office applications.

Users who upgrade (if you can call it that) to Outlook 2007 will notice a large performance change. It's much slower than Outlook 2003 to send e-mails. Supposedly it's a reason for spammers to not spam. But any spammer with brains would simply chuck Outlook in favor of another spamming tool.

I have encountered a problem with Outlook on numerous occasions in which the software indicated that my data file had not been closed properly, and went into a correction mode that would further slow my system's performance. Typically those spurts last 15 minutes to an hour. I'm allowed to work, but at a decreased speed in every application.

I had to throw out one of my favorite applications, NEO Pro (a software that better organizes my e-mail to be able to retrieve it easily), because NEO Pro apparently is not compatible with the 2007 version of Outlook. In addition, I've encountered problems sporadically with Franklin Covey's PlanPlus for Outlook since the upgrade.

The positives of going to Outlook 2007 from earlier versions are an enhanced user interface and better, faster search, but because of all the other problems, I wouldn't call it an enhanced user experience. If you feel compelled to upgrade to Office 2007 for the other applications, think twice about whether you want to include Outlook. You may be better off keeping the older version.