Why Choose Outlook Over Gmail – 10 Reasons

In an organization, the ease of work and productivity are important factors in work policy. It is better to listen to the employees and decide what is better – Outlook or Gmail – to keep their organization productive and their employees satisfied.

Here is a list of reasons as to why choose Outlook over Gmail for Work.

1. The integration of email, calendars and email contacts is the primary method of communication for business today. Clients tell us they see Outlook as a place for effective communication at work to complete tasks. Whether it’s hosting a meeting, finding more information about a contact, making a conference call, or going to an online meeting, Outlook is their hub. They tell us how they like the consistent inbox experience, because inbox lets them do a lot of work without thinking about it. When they start using Outlook every morning, this consistent aspect allows them to get the job done with little or no training every day. On the other hand, Gmail often tries a new experience, such as a new composition or a new inbox.

2. Offline access to emails: An important topic in all of our discussions is being able to manage emails without worrying if they are connected to the internet. Customers tell us that when they travel by air, their favorite business activity is to clear their email backlogs. Most of them use Outlook on the go. They can read and reply to emails as if they were sitting at a desk and connected to the Internet. After re-establishing the Internet connection, the e-mail will be sent automatically. If Gmail is offline, users can only access emails from the previous month without an internet connection. Additionally, users can only access their mail offline on Chrome and Safari browsers. Conversely, Outlook does not have these restrictions.

3. Organize your email the way you do, not all users work the same way. Some people sort their folders alphabetically, others don’t. Some people just like to search for their email, while others need to be able to find their email in a specific “trash can”. Therefore, they are best associated with folders in Outlook. Users use Gmail to organize emails in limited ways. They are limited to using tags to organize emails. Asking users to relearn how they organize their email is completely unacceptable to them. As one user said, “It feels like trying to get the job done through workarounds.”

 4. Classify email items to stay organized: With Outlook, users can assign categories to various items (for example, mail, calendar appointments, tasks, and so on). You can assign multiple categories to a project and rank it in multiple ways. Those who need visual cues can color-code the categories. By looking at the color-coded events on the calendar, users can see at a glance how they spend their time in different regions. Those who use categories and color codes to keep their work organized cannot imagine without it. These customers need to be limited when they try to use color to distinguish items in their inbox, activity in Google, etc. The inability to match colors to different articles in the email makes color coding meaningless for these customers.

 5. Multiple ways to find emails: Users need more ways to find emails. When users know what they are looking for, it is very helpful to use search to find emails. But users insist that “sometimes you just don’t know what to look for” and have to rely on the location of the email sent to find it. When you don’t know how to describe a search, you can find emails in various ways. These features can sort emails by date and size, specify a time range, and determine the scope of where you want to find. Outlook offers a variety of ways to track users’ search content, including their searches, folders, categories, email sorting in inbox, search folders, etc. With Gmail, users can’t sort emails by size, date, or sender. It remains only for one thing: to seek!

6. Flag, Change Email Importance – Outlook makes it easy to tag emails to get attention quickly. One customer described it as: “When I see an email with a red exclamation mark in my inbox, I know I need to process it as soon as possible.” The lack of a “red exclamation point” in Gmail makes users feel confused about which email is more important than other emails. Since they cannot set a “red exclamation point” when composing an email, they cannot correctly prioritize the recipient’s email. Conversely, Outlook can not only easily add a “red exclamation point”, but can also flag emails for quick follow-up or change the importance of emails to “low” to indicate a lack of urgency. Customers tell us that these seemingly few features make users’ daily work efficiency much higher than that of Gmail, which doesn’t use these features.

 7. Rich Contact Information – It’s nice to hear users describe how they can find someone’s office by looking at the contact card. The contact card in Outlook provides a lot of information about the user. The photo in the contact card allows the user to associate a face with a name. The “Status” information shows the user’s status, such as whether he is busy, offline, and so on. Users can quickly and easily chat with contacts, schedule appointments, make quick calls or start conversations. Online meeting. Unlike Gmail, business cards in Outlook also contain information about each person’s job title, department, and location.

 8. Organize Meeting Rooms: Outlook allows users to organize meeting rooms, projectors, and other resources by simply adding them as resources to the meeting. Then, the resource works like any attendee, including the ability to automatically respond to meeting invitations and the ability to view the availability schedule. Users who want to do this easily through Gmail will end up getting frustrated, because the experience of using Gmail to schedule meeting resources is a tedious, multi-step process involving a primary calendar and a secondary calendar.

 9. Email Tips: How many of you accidentally send email messages to a long mailing list instead of the one you want? I’m sure many of you could be related to this situation, as if embarrassing me! For users like me, Outlook email tips are a lifesaver. When you start composing an email, a message will appear stating that you may be sending the message to a larger distribution list. If that’s not the purpose of the email, that’s a good warning sign. This is a good example, it allows you to make the right decision while continuing to help you improve your work efficiency. This feature will be more noticeable when the recipient of the email is on vacation or activates its auto reply feature. When you start composing an email, the recipient’s auto-reply message will appear in the message, saving you the trouble of waiting for a vacation reply to schedule the appropriate follow-up actions. When an email reminder pops up in Outlook, it will appeal to customers who switch through Gmail, telling them that urgent messages may be addressed to users who are unavailable for a few days.

10. Sharing and Delegating Calendars: The administrative assistant responsible for managing multiple calendars told us that using Google Calendar was one of the most painful experiences for them. From Google’s point of view, they claim they face “calendar confusion”, leading some people to use paper calendars to check things out! With Google Calendar, you can choose to share all the details on the calendar, or you can only share the free / busy schedule. It does not have the free / busy sharing function only with the event object. There is no level of control over what details are shared. After returning from Gmail to Outlook, customers can better control their calendar management. For example, the user can decide whether to share everyone’s “free / busy” status with the meeting subject. They can also choose to share full details about each meeting, including topics, attendees, locations, etc. Once the calendar is delegated, the administrative assistant can easily manage the delegated calendar along with their calendar in a simple side-by-side view and minimize the confusion of making changes to the wrong calendar!

So, now we know the reasons why Outlook is preferred over Gmail.

If you are switching from Gmail to Outlook and want to migrate over your data, you can consider using Gmail backup solution.

If your organization is moving from G Suite to Office 365, you can try SysTools Migrator for this task.