Microsoft’s flagship program shows its age. If you think that Microsoft Outlook 2013 would get dramatic new features and enhancements like other Office 2013 applications, you are wrong. Microsoft Outlook 2013 is basically the same as version 2010. The following has changed:

The whole application looks flat, which is suitable for the design language in Windows 8. The whole app is black and white and contains a lot of white and gray, sometimes with a blue accent. For me, this color scheme makes it difficult to distinguish certain parts of the interface. There are no more symbols and everything is heavy on the text. Below are the sections Email, Calendar, People, Tasks, and more. Gone are the buttons and symbols that fold for minimalist text (function () {(‘review-app-page-desktop’);});

Microsoft Outlook 2013 has a touch mode that displays the same menus as other Office 2013 applications. There is a bar with common commands such as answering, deleting, moving, selecting and selecting. This is great and gives Microsoft Outlook 2013 a great touch experience.

You can now zoom in on your calendar to switch between day, week and month. If you are in another section of Microsoft Outlook 2013 next to your calendar, you can now hover over the calendar section to see a pop-up window about your calendar and current tasks. The calendar also shows weather information for your area.

Microsoft Lync is still fully integrated with Microsoft Outlook 2013, so you can view a colleague’s status and start a voice or video call directly from Microsoft Outlook 2013.

Although the e-mail view is a bit difficult to read due to the monochrome color scheme, the view of people in Microsoft Outlook 2013 has improved significantly. Contacts now retrieves information from online sources such as Facebook and Linkedin if you have linked these services to your Microsoft account.

Microsoft Outlook 2013 merges duplicate contacts and creates a contact card for the merged information. If your contact has an image, the image is displayed as a thumbnail next to the contact. It is strange that Microsoft did not include this in the email view for Microsoft Outlook 2013 to visually separate the different emails.

Even more confusing is the lack of chain messages in Microsoft Outlook 2013. You still need to look for previous emails in the conversation. Oddly enough, Microsoft’s proprietary Mail application offers chain messages in Windows 8 and Windows RT.

Another annoying change is Microsoft Outlook 2013 notifications. There is no way to close them all in bulk, so you can close lots of alerts when Microsoft Outlook 2013 goes back online. Microsoft also removed the ability to reply to the email from the message, which was a very useful feature.

If you do not like Outlook 2010, Microsoft Outlook 2013 will not convince you. Although there are useful new features, Office 2013 seems to be due to a boring interface and lack of functionality in an outdated email program.