I stuck with Office 2003 at home for a while. Eventually I wanted a few more features, especially in Excel. That’s when I went shopping for alternatives.
Outlook is by far the worst piece of software I have to use on a daily basis. It would be terrible even without the bloat. It also violates every UI design principle that MS or anyone else has ever written. And it’s riddled with bugs. Another one that gets me multiple times a day is that hitting ctrl-I to exit italic mode just fails like half the time. I think it actually doubles the keypress, exiting and reentering it. I have to go back and fix the formatting all the damn time.
It’s not like MS can’t write good software. Visual Studio and VSCode are both fantastic products. And I have few complaints about Windows 10. Heck, even Edge is pretty good. But the Office team is like a completely different company. And Outlook combines the worst qualities of every other Office product.
I’m not familiar with the latest versions which may well be crap, but with respect to 2003 and 2007, that has not been my experience. I only use it as a simple email client, but a friend uses it as a critical part of a small business and I’ve heard no complaints from them, except for occasionally blowing through the maximum PST file size. I’ve helped them with that by extending the allowable size through registry edits. But, wary of the fact that Microsoft is notoriously bad at testing boundary conditions, I didn’t want to extend those limits too far, so I also suggested that they segment their PST archives. So far all has been working well.
They also have a lot of Excel data which they literally use as an ODBC database, for instance for generating labels via mail/merge. All of this stuff works perfectly well, with Excel being a pretty good stand-in for a relational database.
I’m sure it has some great features for power users. But as a plain email client, it sucks. Did I mention that it’s slow and that the search blows?
Supposedly, part of the issue is that they’re using some ancient HTML engine to render the email, and that some upcoming version will upgrade to the Edge renderer (Chromium), but I’m not getting my hopes up.
It’s literally taken days off my life. I have to skim through a crapton of email daily, and the fact that it takes a few seconds to render each email adds several minutes of pure waste to each workday.
Why won’t mobile email clients show me the full headers of a message?
I get it, that’s an incredibly useful defensive feature that will only ever be accessed by 5% of users. Then can you at least show me the actual From: and To: lines with the addresses as sent, not prettified and hidden?
It’s like they want me to fall for a phishing scam.
K9 on Android is the only mobile email client I’ve found that will show full headers. There might be others, but I haven’t found them.
Also, most new mobile email clients aren’t proper email clients, they’re just custom interfaces to some cloud based email thing, where the client’s cloud service gets the email from my server, and puts it on their server. If I wanted my email on somebody else’s server, I’d just be using gmail or whatever in the first place.
I used to complain about Outlook, and how my company implemented Outlook, Exchange and the rest of the Microsoft Office suite. (For one thing, at my level, the lowest one, I was limited to a mailbox of no more than 150MB and PST files were prohibited, so I was constantly deleting mail less than a month or two old.) And then a couple of years ago, we switched to the Google suite, including Gmail. On the positive side, my mailbox is now, more or less, unlimited, so I never delete anything. On the negative side, it’s very difficult to find email messages, which seems ironic, given that Google is known for its search engine. Formatting emails is weird; for one thing, I can’t use a tab in the body of a message.
And we’ve embraced shared Google Docs and Google Sheets documents, which makes collaboration easier. Except some of the shared Sheets documents have way too many columns but I can’t hide some of them because that will hide them for everyone. And it’s far too easy to accidentally delete a whole column of needed data.
Maybe I just need more experience with the Google suite, but I had decades of experience with Office that’s now useless to me.
In the end Gmail makes me nostalgic for Outlook and the rest of Office.
This is odd. My job recently switched the other way from GMail to Outlook, and I always found GMail’s search tool almost magical, able to call up any email from forever in milliseconds. Outlook’s search is…inferior and infuriating.
There’s a legitimate reason that I have MacOS 10.6.8 preserved as a virtual machine and always open. I still, even to this day, use Eudora for my email.
I can find my emails! (insert “nanny nanny boo boo” sounds here)
Mrs. FtG has an older, but still quite decent laptop. I went to print something she had recieved. The print menu window didn’t fit the screen, it was too long. The “Print” button was somewhere off the screen. No scroll bar or anything. Tried another program, different print menu, same problem. Luckily that one defaulted to “enter” = “print” so I got it printed.
I’ve seen this many times for various pop-up menus.
Look, idjit software bums, when you pop up a window, check if it will fit, if it doesn’t, put in scroll bar(s).
I am in the Gmail search is great / Outlook sucks camp. But just now I realized one of the reasons Outlook search is so useless for me.
We often email around code zipped up in bundles, but not with the .zip file extension. Sometimes I want to search for the names of functions, etc. in my email history. Outlook is apparently looking inside these bundles–based, presumably, on a file type detected from the binary data instead of the extension–and searching the contents of that.
It’s actually kinda nifty, in a sense. Except that it’s absolutely never what I want. These code bundles contain big chunks of our codebase and will always come up with something, even if it was totally unrelated to the email. I want to search only the email itself. It’s pure pollution in the results.
I haven’t worked with Outlook in ages, but can’t you refine the search to only search in subject/body/attachments? Because that feature is so obvious and easy to implement that Outlook should have it. But yeah, I’ve had to work with Office products long enough to know that you can’t expect rational functionality…
My new Highlander navigation system. Typically there are two forms of display: one where the direction you are heading is always to the top and the other so north is always to the top. I prefer north to the top but it resets to other way every single time. No way to save my preference or have it default to the last view. Nope! Have to change it every time. Even Tesla and their crappy software can figure how to save a preference.
For waaayyyyyy too many years, Microsoft Excel would exit without asking if you wanted to save. It was much too easy to do, and whole work days were lost because of it on a regular basis. It was SUCH a PITA. I just can’t believe how long it took them to fix this.
My new very expensive Kitchenaid dishwasher doesn’t remember my cycle preferences either, and no way to change the defaults. No, I don’t want heated dry, and I don’t want to have to turn it off every time.
Delta’s echeck-in system for iphones. Checking in from my PC at home for the outbound trip was no problem. Then for the return trip and being away from my computer, I tried to do it on my phone. Big fucking mistake. First of all, for fields that can only be numeric (credit card number, expiration date, security code, zip code, date of birth) I had to switch the keyboard to numeric entry- each and every field. So easy to avoid with a competent programmer. Then the fields are not aligned vertically so it’s easy to miss one (I think the state name) that was off to the left and off screen. Then, this is the big one, ANY error that you might make forces you to re-enter the ENTIRE form again. Lucky for me, I was at my son’s house and could check in on his desktop. Still a terrible interface for the iphone.
Our dishwasher is a Kenmore, although I believe it’s secret identity is Whirlpool. I noticed awhile back that when my wife would start it, she’d select Normal Wash, then turn off Heated Dry, then hit Start. I said, “You know, if you just hit Start it does the same thing.” So, heated dry is on by default if you select normal wash, but if you don’t select anything it defaults to normal wash with heated dry off.
Which just goes to show that sometimes, in some companies, the IT folks seem more interested in being part of the problem instead of actually providing the IT solutions that they’re paid to provide (hence the IT manager in the Dilbert strips being known as “Mordac the Preventer of Information Services” – trust me, it’s not just an empty joke). 150 MB in most cases is a ridiculously low limit. Typical PST archives or equivalent individual Exchange mailboxes should be sized in (many) gigabytes, not megabytes. How expensive do these pinheads think disk storage is, especially compared to the cost/benefits of worker productivity?
Are you talking about the actual iPhone app, or just the mobile version of their web site? I don’t recall ever having those issues checking in using their app. In fact, as long as I’m logged into my SkyMiles account in the app I don’t even have to enter that information. I just get a push notification telling me it’s time to check in, I open the app, check a box confirming I’m not bringing any hazardous materials, and that’s pretty much it, I’m checked in. If I want to modify anything like changing my seat assignment or add a checked bag, I can then do that after checking in.
(insert “nanny nanny boo boo” sounds here)