1. Features they Removed that I actually used on a regular basis:

a) New E-Mail Message – pictures of contacts used to appear at the bottom of the window as you added people to the “To” line of the e-mail message.  That feature has saved me from e-mailing the wrong “Dave” on more than one occasion.  In 2013 the feature is missing and I’ve lost that extra sanity check.

b) Cannot create tasks by drag and drop of e-mail to date. 

In Outlook 2010 you could drag and drop an e-mail to a date on the calendar and get a task ON THAT DATE for the item.  Can’t do that anymore.

2. UI Glitches:

Drag a message to 2nd screen – message gets cut-off. 

Especially if the message spans more than one screen you lose the contents of the message aren’t all visible.

Unable to recover Outlook window after it got sized too small by the OS.

I went to connect a data projector to my machine and Windows 7 changed the screen to 640×480.  Outlook window got resized that small too.  Since then even though computer is back to normal screen resolution, Outlook always opens at that 640×480 screen size, and cannot be resized to any other size.  In fact the window becomes completely non-responsive.  The only way to open Outlook was to do it from a command prompt with the outlook.exe /safe command line switch.

3. Contacts Cards

The contact cards thing is killing my productivity.  In all Prior Outlook releases you get the real outlook contact card with nice big HTML notes.  I could insert pictures, tables word snippets, etc and track useful information about my contacts. 

The new contact cards thing limits you to name address phone number and that’s it.  You have to wait for up to 30 seconds before it “realizes” there is even an Outlook contact and then it takes time for that to open.

I get the same name showing up multiple times, and sometimes when I search for the exact spelling of the person’s full name as entered in my Outlook contact there’s no match at all.  Complete time waster.  Killing my productivity.

4. Never-ending authentication prompts

This version of Outlook cannot seem to keep a connection to Microsoft Exchange 2007.  I’m prompted between 5 and 10 times per day to re-enter authentication credentials.  Save checkbox doesn’t seem to work at all.  (Not a problem on prior versions of Outlook).

5. Too much white space on calendar

I cannot see an entire business day in 1/4 hour increments in this version like I could in prior versions – even on high resolution screens like 1920×1200. 

I really hope they fix these things.  Other improvements that they did make that I liked just aren’t enough to outweigh these major flaws/bugs in my mind.   I put up with this for over 6 months, cannot live with it anymore.