In a new Outlook blog post, Microsoft mentions a few features and components that are being dropped from Outlook 2013. Of the features, Microsoft mentions that Outlook 2013 will no longer support importing and exporting of Excel 97-2003 (.xls) and Word 97-2003 (.doc) file formats.
“As much as we love adding new features to Outlook, for the maintainability of our product we sometimes need to remove those that are out of date and aren’t utilized by a large number of users. This allows us to focus on improving the Outlook features that most of you, our customers, rely on,” Microsoft stated in the official blog post. Microsoft mentions that while Outlook has always supported importing and exporting data to/from many file formats, some are outdated and need to be removed. Microsoft mentions that Outlook 2013 will continue to support .csv and .pst, but no longer will support .doc and .xls, as well as Outlook Express archives and ACT! Contact manager files. A few other features were removed as well, including Exchange “Classic Offline” Mode, “Deliver to PST” location settings for Exchange accounts, calendar publishing to Outlook.com, VPN and dialup preferences, Journaling, and the removal of the Contact Activities Tab.
