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I've got two open Office for Mac questions on SU (specifically, Outlook 2011). I'd say I'm not bad at the dark art of stackexchange question writing and that they're not bad questions and not especially difficult for someone with the right experience. But one of them is double tumbleweed (or, it would be if that was possible), and the other would be, were it not for one solitary upvote.

  1. Sent items listed by sender's name (my name!) not recipient in Outlook for Mac 2011 (edit: by my request migrated to apple.SE)
  2. Attach HTML as text in Outlook for Mac (2011)?

Looking at the Outlook-2011 tag, it looks like there aren't many people on SU interested in that product (two followers, and I'm the only recent activity). I'd add bounties, but if there aren't many people with the appropriate knowledge, I suspect that I'd just be dropping my very limited rep down the drain. As a non-software-expert who depends on software, I need those precious 140 points in case I hit a problem needing a bounty where there are enough SU users with suitable knowledge that the bounty would help.

These are genuine problems I really want answers for, but it ain't working here. I had the idea of asking them to be migrated to apple.stackexchange.com, which should at the very least be a good place to find Mac experts (and I flagged the double-tumbleweed one to be migrated by a moderator). But looking at the Apple.SE ms-office tag, I see an awful lot of tumbleweed there too, and just 6 followers (for the whole Office suite, every version ever). I guess the Apple fanatics over at that site aren't big fans of Microsoft...

My questions are on-topic for both sites, but seem to have fallen down the crack between the two sites. Any ideas for anything I could do to get answers to these? Other sites they could be moved to, ways I could get them seen by the right people?

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Any ideas for anything I could do to get answers to these?

I think you did the best you could. You wrote very precise questions, gave enough details to work with. You requested migration for one question that didn't get enough attention – which is also fine to do.

All that's really left to do is placing a bounty. I can understand that with 140 reputation, you probably don't want (or can't afford) to give that away. I've started a bounty on the one question you have in the meantime.

That being said, I just assume it's a combination of factors that come into play here:

  • OS X users are in the minority here
  • Not many OS X users will use Office for Mac (don't quote me on that)
  • Outlook (just like any other program in Office for Mac) is a badly designed piece of software suite with lots of problems and no solutions (you can almost quote me on that)

Of course, you might just not get an answer to your questions at all – but at least they'd deserve attention.

Other sites they could be moved to?

Not on the Stack Exchange network. If your OS X question was about its Unix internals, you could probably ask on Unix.SE, but not in this case.

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  • The big advantage of Office is integration with business infrastructure, and if that's a concern for you, you're likely using Windows anyway. OS X ships with a decent mail client, calendar and address book that probably fulfills the needs of 90+% of users, leaving a very small market for Office. That Office doesn't support basic power user requirements (custom keyboard shortcuts I know, Services, AppleScript probably as well) is another disadvantage.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Oct 4, 2012 at 8:14
  • Thanks for the bounty and helpful advice! As you seem to have guessed, I'm not using Outlook for Mac out of choice - it's a big designed-for-PC workplace network centred on Outlook and Exchange Server, and I'm one of a few people using Macs on that network (the reasoning for giving me a mac makes no sense: I need 64 bit and the IT guys, bizarrely, would rather have a Mac or two on the network than try to work with 64 bit Windows. I know that makes no sense, and I tried reasoning with them...). p.s. I love "piece of software suite" as a euphemism... Oct 4, 2012 at 8:50

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