Outlook 2016 is the latest edition of Outlook for Mac client by Microsoft. It has some new features from the previous edition of 2011. It’s interface also went through slight changes as compared to the earlier versions.
Outlook 2011 and Outlook 2016
If you recently installed 2016, you will notice that it doesn’t override the 2011 edition installation. You can still use both versions in your Mac.
That brings us to the question of should one keep or remove Outlook 2011 after installing Outlook 2016?
Outlook 2011 and Outlook 2016 actions can be seem obvious to users depending on few factors. So, let’s find out what difference does it make by keeping and removing the 2011 edition.
- First of all, keeping Outlook 2011 along with Outlook 2016 will take up your space on hard drive. And for those who use SSD as their main drive to install programs, this can be a problem. You do not want to keep unnecessary files to eat up your precious space in SSDS.
- And it’s not just about the size that Outlook installation files take. It’s also about the Outlook 2011 identities. All the previous data stored in Outlook 2011 can take up a lot of space. I personally know many people who have their profile folders size up to 50 GB or more. That would clearly be a huge problem for many users.
- Keeping both clients, however, can be useful in certain situations, where Outlook 2016 doesn’t offer the same feature or have some issues (like not being able to connect to mail servers). Though Outlook 2016 is a modern version of its 2011 counterpart, it still misses few features that 2011 edition has. And there are also few alternatives to the features in 2011, and you might prefer the legacy ones.
- On the other hand, one of the cons of keeping both clients and using them at the same time can cause problems with syncing data. IMAP protocol doesn’t have much issues with syncing data to mail servers; however, POP accounts do. So, if you are using POP account in 2011, know that any changes will not be synced, and you might see different data in 2011 and 2016. Every time you make a change in 2011, you have to export the data to OLM files and then import them to 2016. It’s not a practical solution at all.
The rest is your decision. If the problems with keeping both clients do not apply to you, you do not have to uninstall. But if they do, Outlook 2011 gotta go.
And if you are going to get rid of Outlook 2011 identities as well, before you do that, make sure all the data have been successfully imported to 2016. It doesn’t make sense to use Outlook 2016 and still keep 2011 identities around.