Microsoft broke its promise

One aspect of the Apple ecosystem that drew me was the ability to automate common actions or steps I had to take. This included the ability to re-use information¹ from one application to another. I'm a fan of any tool that can do multiple things well. ² For a long time that tool has been Outlook to manage my email, calendar and contacts. Recently Microsoft has stated that the "legacy" version of Outlook for Mac would be retired.

The problem with the "new" Outlook for Mac is that it doesn't include AppleScript support. For a couple of years I've been monitoring the progress of Microsoft to build AppleScript into the latest version of Outlook. Microsoft was transparent about what they had on their road map. So every month or so I would look up Roadmap ID : 88537 to see their progress.

I've continued to monitor Microsoft's progress with implementing AppleScript into Outlook for Mac. A recent search for the update led me an abrupt dead end.

Whelp... I guess I can stop monitoring their progress. Microsoft flipped the status of the Roadmap to "Cancelled" back in August and pulled the roadmap entry completely this fall.

What I had with Legacy Outlook

For as long as I can remember, I've been using a variant of a script I originally picked up from Justin Yancy (Veritrope.com) many moons ago. The script, paired with Keyboard Maestro, allowed me to pull email information from Outlook into OmniFocus. The goal was to reuse the information in an email to note a task I had to take care of in OmniFocus. The script has been modified since Justin's first version, but did exactly what I needed.

While I hate to see AppleScript support get swept under the rug, finally getting Oath2.0 support for AppleID account is too little/too late.

Going back to basics

I've been looking at replacement clients for Outlook, and there are a couple that look interesting, but most require some sort of subscription. If I was a small business owner, or used a Mac at work ³, I'd be apt to look at one of these clients. For now I'll be moving back to Apple Mail for my email client.

The upside of moving back to Apple Mail is AppleScript is natively supported, so the script to replicate the one I had for Outlook is much simpler:

tell application "Mail"
    set selectedMessages to selection

    if (count of selectedMessages) is not 1 then
        display alert "Select one email" message ¬
            "Select exactly one message in Mail, then run this macro again."
        return
    end if

    set selectedMessage to item 1 of selectedMessages
    set taskTitle to subject of selectedMessage
    set taskNote to content of selectedMessage
end tell

if taskTitle is missing value or taskTitle is "" then ¬
    set taskTitle to "(No subject)"
if taskNote is missing value then set taskNote to ""

set taskTitle to taskTitle as text
set taskNote to taskNote as text

tell application "OmniFocus"
    tell default document
        make new inbox task with properties ¬
            {name:taskTitle, note:taskNote}
    end tell
end tell

return

Just like before, I'll use a Keyboard Maestro keyboard shortcut macro to move an email from Apple Mail into OmniFocus.

The move has been a little bumpy because I didn't realize over the years my contacts list had drifted between Outlook and Contacts. So next project is to look at an AppleScript to migrate Outlook contacts to iCloud Contacts.