Mac Mail - text formatting. How do you rate it?

Since getting Leopard I have been using Mail a bit more (I normally just use my web browser).

At work (on Outlook) I routinely have to carefully structure emails to make my point using bullets, numbered bullets, copying and pasting, dragging around and generally restructuring until I have a very clear, 'punchy' message.

My attempts to work in a similar way in Mac Mail are frankly frustrating. Is it just a bit lacking or do I need to try some tutorials?

 

Microsoft Outlook is a much more powerful E-mail client, but using bullet points and copy pasting should work just fine in Mail.app.
Where are you experiencing issues? Customizing the New Message toolbar usually gives you access to all the popular formatting options such as adding bullet points.

 

Thanks, customising the new message toolbar already helps a little bit, but the main frustrations are little glitches that dont happen in outlook.

for example I wanted top copy text from an excel cell onto the end of a sentence, but it put it on a new line. So I put the cursor back to the start of the line and hit backspace, but the line won't go back. After three attempts I ended up just typing the text.

Similarly, when working with a bulleted list I wanted to use combinations of 'return' or 'backspace' to expand or reduce the elements of the list, but it didnt work at all intuitively like in Outlook.

Maybe I need to practice a bit, and reduce my expectations...

 

Yeah, the reason Microsoft Office applications work so well with Outlook is because they are all part of the Microsoft Office Suite, one of the key reasons why Microsoft leads so far ahead of Apple.

You might want to try out something such as Entrouage, which, despite being uttlery rubbish, might give you the extra compatibility you require with other Office applications since it is also part of the suite.

 

Thanks.

I prefer not to touch Entourage with a barge pole - when I work from home it is from an email account I can only access by https anyway, the Mac Mail formatting was basically just for fun

 

I found problems with fonts. As a default it is Helvetica, but some computers don't have it. If I switch to Tahoma, then the font looks all right under MS Outlook but not under Outlook Express. Have you found the same?