I swear I used to be able to close windows in Outlook (open messages, etc) using Ctrl-W, but now it’s only accepting ALT-F4. How do I change it to Ctrl-W?
Perhaps you’re thinking of Internet Explorer?
Anyway, a good place to look for tips like that is http://www.annoyances.org/
It looks like Ctrl+W is already assigned to “Newsgroups” or something.
Makes me long for customization along the lines of Softimage XSI. You have complete control over each and every keyboard shortcut with a GUI.
According to this, you have some control over shortcuts, but only using Alt, not Ctrl.
Most programs, as well as Windows itself, close windows with Control-W. I didn’t know it wasn’t universal until I noticed I couldn’t close Outlook windows. Frustrating that the Outlook team didn’t notice that.
Did you ever use Outlook on a Mac? It’s Command + W to close windows there.
It should be Ctrl+F4 to close the window and Alt+F4 to close the application.
It is.
What folks don’t realize is the email compose window is actually a separate program instance of (typically) MS Word launched by the main Outlook app. So using Alt-F4 to close out that separate app is completely compliant with the Windows keyboard shortcut standards.
Not necessarily. Older versions of Outlook will default to using Word if it is present, but you can disable that and Outlook will use its own internal message editor.
True. And hence my parenthetical “(typically)”. But it’s still launched as a separate process and Alt-F4 is still the keyboard UI for “terminate process.”
A decent argument can be made that using Alt-F4 is correct from the geek POV but not from the end-user POV. But those sorts of issues / dilemmas pop up all the time in UI design. And it’s real easy for developers to paint themselves into a corner with usablility or upgrade path when they let the end user mental model get too far afield from the internal logic model.