PC World takes a first look at Outlook 2011, which is part of the new Office 2011 for Mac suite.

Office 2011 jettisons Entourage in favor of Outlook 2011. We'll be posting our full review of Office's new e-mail/calendar/contacts/to-do tool soon. But in the meantime, here's a first look.

The first thing you notice is that, compared to the somewhat gray and sober Entourage ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ), Outlook 2011 is far cheerier and more colorful, and uses many more of the Mac's familiar design conventions. Microsoft's coders seem to have done an admirable job of packing Outlook's mind-boggling abundance of features into a clear, coherent interface. For example, in each of Outlook's five main panes (Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, and Notes), the new Ribbon interface runs across the top of the window, displaying sets of big, easily understandable buttons for the most important tools, grouped by tabs.

  First Look: Outlook 2011