I agree with everything Zac said about the new Outlook. I'll add that (at least as of last check a couple of months ago, so maybe these have changed since then), it's no good with mouse and keyboard either:
1. In other apps (Explorer, Desktop Outlook, file dialogs, etc.) if you drag an item to a folder tree and the folder tree is longer than the window so you need to scroll to access the top and bottom, it will start scrolling up or down when you drag to the bottom or top of the visible folder tree respectively. In New Outlook, it does nothing. There is no way to drag and drop to folders not already in view.
The ONLY way to drag and drop to these folders is to first scroll the folder tree to show the destination. How do you break basic drag and drop when ALL other apps handle this correctly?
2. For misspelled words in all other MS apps (and pretty much all third-party apps too), you right click on word that's misspelled and has the red-underline to select the alternative. Or, for those of us who type a lot, we may use keyboard shortcuts to avoid moving a hand to the mouse. That Menu key (that MS is disturbingly removing from the basic laptop keyboard in favor of the Copilot key, but fortunately Shift+F10 performs this same function) serves as the keyboard cursor equivalent to the right-mouse button. New Outlook doesn't support right-click or menu key to select the correct word when on a red-underlined misspelled word.
Instead, new Outlook requires you to left-click on the misspelled word, which means left-click is now harder to use if you just want to select text and ignore the misspelling (such as you always want to do for rare proper names that you don't want to add to your dictionary) . This is a terrible misuse of the left-mouse button, violating decades of established use -- left click to click buttons and select, right click to bring up the actions menu.
Even if you don't mind how this works in New Outlook (and frankly even if MS has fixed this in the latest version of New Outlook), how could any product manager have ever thought this was an acceptable change? Was the thinking by that team, "The way it works in Word, Desktop Outlook, every web-based text box, PowerPoint, Teams, etc. is wrong. We need to change this and show the rest of MS how spell correction should work?"
The fact that Outlook even went into broad testing with those problems scares me that the team responsible for it doesn't care about users and UX. I have reported these myself many times over the past 2 years. I view that as a bigger concern than their failure to get the performance or all features in yet. It's that they actively show disdain for what millions of us are accustomed to. They actively disregarded the standards and precedent of decades of Windows and Windows apps. There is no way there are so many cases of this that slipped through the cracks by accident. It shows a mindset of, "We don't care what users want. We know better what you should want."
And I'm not anti-MS. I happen to think Teams is the greatest product Microsoft has ever released and reflects the best of what modern Microsoft can do. But new Outlook is at the far, far, far other end of the spectrum. It's horrible.
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