I know the world is full of rants about MS Office, but I want to add my own. Why in the holy church of cluster fucks do the Outlook customized settings get wiped out when you reinstall MS Office? I know Outlook is part of Office, but there’s no bleeding, effing excuse for storing a user’s customized settings in the same hard drive location as the rest of the program. They should be in the user profile area. Asshats!
As you can tell by the strength of this rant, I’m a heavy customizer. I find that out of the box Outlook is nearly unusable.
I didn’t notice anything different when I got the new version of MS Office a month ago. My only complaint was about the new color scheme that made it harder for me to spot emails that I hadn’t responded to yet. What sort of customizations are you doing?
Almost everything. Here are just some off the top of my head:
group email inboxes listed in my navigation pane (no longer there)
I prefer the preview/reading pane on the bottom (MS says it’s on the right)
customized columns everywhere (reverted to defaults)
custom view (now gone)
Other stuff I can’t think of right now but will re-discover over the next few days. :mad:
Did think of a few more but missed the edit window:
They just happened to downgrade me from 2013 to 2010 (to attempt to solve a different Office issue) and Lync is no longer here. No big deal except I did use it to msg with coworkers on occasion but mostly depended on it to know coworker statuses.
Tomorrow they’re going to upgrade me back to 2013 and I’ll get Lync back. But that means Outlook will re-revert to showing all of the Lync crap that wasted screen space. I like the tiny little lights next to names. I hate having a “pane” on the bottom of the window with pictures (or blanks in our case) of each person.
I just upgraded from Office 2010 to Office 365… It kept most of my settings, but reset a few to default values. Meh. No big changes; I’m getting along well enough.
The thing that took me the most effort to get used to is how, when you type, the letters “scan in” rather than “popping in.” And when you move the cursor, it “moves” from point to point, rather than jumping. It’s purely a visual effect, and it is a change from all previous tradition in computing.
(Also, it was incompatible with my OCR scanning software add-in, which I had to disable. That took a call to Microsoft to resolve.)
Another one: I change how it marks messages as read. The default is to mark it as read when you click on a different message, but I prefer it to mark it after it’s been displayed for 2 seconds. Tons and tons of very fiddly little details like this. If it was one or two things it would be no big deal. But having to go through and re-set around a hundred little fiddly things that shouldn’t have been lost to begin with makes me angry cat.
I also customized the view and saved it as “my personal view” or whatever I named it. It’s gone. So I have to go through and fix all of the column, sort, group by, filter and other settings that I had in my customized view. No excuse for losing something that you specifically allowed the user to save a custom version of.
I’m on 2016 now and the search in Outlook sucks donkey balls. It wants to search all mailboxes but then when I point it at the folder I’m on – no results. When I then look and find the email with that string of characters in its subject, RIGHT THERE!!
Funs not going to stop there. After MS bought LinkInned, they’re going to integrate the social media doodads into MS Office and have even MORE ways you can be spammed about the pretend careers of people tangentially associated with you.