When comparing Fantastical 2 vs Microsoft Outlook, the Slant community recommends Fantastical 2 for most people. In the question“What are the best calendar apps for Mac OS X?” Fantastical 2 is ranked 3rd while Microsoft Outlook is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Fantastical 2 is:
Fantastical makes it really easy to add events using their superb natural language parser. For instance, an entry like "breakfast at 9am at The Diner" will be handled correctly. In addition to their best in class natural language processing, Fantastical has awesome features such as allowing users to append "/work" or "/personal" in order to add events to the specified calendar and setting up abbreviations that will add snippets of text.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Very polished natural language text entry
Fantastical makes it really easy to add events using their superb natural language parser. For instance, an entry like "breakfast at 9am at The Diner" will be handled correctly.
In addition to their best in class natural language processing, Fantastical has awesome features such as allowing users to append "/work" or "/personal" in order to add events to the specified calendar and setting up abbreviations that will add snippets of text.
Pro Awesome syncing support
Google, iCloud, Facebook, CalDAV, Exchanged, and iPhone calendar are all supported out of the box.
Pro "Dayticker" is a great way to quickly see appointments
Although pretty simple, the Dayticker view, located at the top of the user interface, is simply fantastic for quickly seeing which days are booked out. It also acts as a convenient way to add new events (long press on a day).
Pro Displays inline map of the event's location
The app displays inline map of the event's provided location. Additionally, users can choose between Apple's Maps or Google's Maps applications to use the feature with.
Pro Allows adding reminders
Using the natural language parser, reminders can be added with the keywords "reminder", "todo", "task", or "remind me to."
Pro Syncs with iOS reminders
Existing reminders can be used or adde with Siri.
Pro Functions as a widget
With Fantastical 2, the calendar can be accessed through a widget in order to save time.
Pro Gesture driven
Fantastical 2 lets users flick, scroll, and swipe to quickly move through different views and types of information.
Pro Custom colors
Tasks can be color coordinated in order to see their categories at a glance.
Pro Resizeable window
The divider between the two views can be dragged for customized viewing.
Pro Good built-in calendar
The calendar includes agenda, day, and three-day views.
Pro Integration with calendar and tasks
Quick conversion of a received email to a task with the deadline.
Pro Fun to use
clean and smooth experience, very nice and i like it.
Pro Smart lookup
Smart lookup is a feature where the Bing search engine is bundled in the app to allow users to automatically search for relevant websites, information and images based on the word highlighted by users, without need to open external browsers. The results will be shown on the right pane of the window.
Pro Priority messages
Microsoft Outlook comes with feature called "Clutter" to filter out incoming email based on the priority of the message set by user. User will be alerted when the high-priority message is incoming, whereas the low-priority message will be put in a separate folder.
Pro Attach files from cloud
Microsoft Outlook allow users to directly attach an attachment directly from cloud services without need to download an entire file before attach to the intended e-mail.
Pro VBA macros
Pro Conditional formatting
Pro Cloud
can attach files and use cloud, very good.
Cons
Con Uses “dots on a day” style interface
This is not the way calendars should work.
Con V2 discontinued, V3 too expensive as a subscription model
Con Only one way to display your events
It would really help to have an actual calendar with the events written into it instead of a list and dots.
Con Have to pay again for the iPad version
Con Not as good as Moleskine cal
Con It's from Microsoft
Con Rather buggy
Con Crashes frequently
The only issue with Outlook 2017 is that when the Mail folder increases in size, it sometimes crashes for no reason it, causing loss of data.
Con Categorize email IMAP not good
Con Frustrating user experience
The "Clean Interface" approach means that normal and necessary user interface elements have been removed, such as certain scroll bars, and even the "replied to" indicator. This program becomes more frustrating with each new update.
Con No unique Inbox / global folders
Con No portable bundle available
Con No aliases
Outlook does not support email aliases other then outlook aliases