What's something about Microsoft Outlook that drives you crazy?
What's something about Microsoft Outlook that drives you crazy?
Obligitory "I have to use it for my job," so let's commiserate.
It's the worst program in all of the Office Suite. MS wrote the goddamn OS and email client, but for some reason if I have two instances open for two different inboxes and try to pull one up on the taskbar, the wrong instance will pull up every single time without fail.
My runner-up complaint is how when I use the search bar, sometimes it'll forget what I'm doing and when I hit enter it'll open some email instead of executing the search.
Every update makes it worse, so what drives you crazy?
We are asked to use Projects to manage our work, and we then mapped the project's structure into a folder structure using sharepoint. The thing is, this structure leads to very long file paths, and Windows won't let us open the files using the file explorer because the file path is too long, and so we need to search stuff through sharepoint, download as zip files, and end up breaking the intended organization. The projects page helps create the illusion of organization for the higher-ups but in reality it is a hindrance. We don't have admin access to the computer and so we can't change this file path limit setting. This is just the first that came to mind of an endless list of complaints I have.
I am willing to forget pretty much any fault on Outlook when I compare it with the absolute dogshit product that is New Outlook.
Click on a Toast and it opens the email… in the background, never in the foreground.
Have anything other than Email selected (calendar, for example) and it doesn’t display the New Email notification on the tile, so if you didn’t see the toast and have anything other then Outlook open in the foreground, you don’t know you’ve got new email until you physically go back to Outlook and click on the Email button.
Want to send a spreadsheet as an email attachment from within Excel? The option is there, but it doesn’t work any more (and the same for any other native “send via email” option in your OS out applications).
Want to send a document as an attachment? You have to open a new email, then drag the document into the correct half of the email, because if you have it too far to the left, Outlook will upload it into OneDrive and put a link to it in the email.
I could go on, but fuck me, it’s absolutely disgusting how much this breaks any previous workflow you may have had for doing email quickly and efficiently…
+ That time they randomly slapped up this tool bar on the left hand side I neither requested nor needed.
The calendar view can't be configured to fit a full 24 hour day and you have to scroll.
I have to run it through a browser because I'm on Linux and it's constantly logging me out Even when I say don't do it don't ask again just keep me logged in. Nope fuck you log out, and sometimes it gets stuck in a loop where I log in and it logs me out immediately over and over until I clear my cache and reset my browser it's insane
Meeting requests tracking, oh my god. It's a great feature but it's got so many quirks.
Once you decline a meeting, it's gone for good in your calendar. If you accidentally declined, you need to ask for another invite. More commonly, plans changed and now you can't attend when you could have because you forgot all about it.
You can't decline important meetings and still see them in your calendar, so people abuse 'tentative' as 'I want to know when this meeting takes place but I won't attend myself'
Can't organize a meeting and then don't attend yourself. Impossible. Neither can you transfer ownership when you're going on holiday for example, so people are stuck with meeting requests nobody can change
Good luck getting a long series of meetings accepted by a meeting room. Every single instance must be available, that's annoying but makes sense. You can cancel or move individual instances until the meeting room accepts it, but everyone gets spammed with invites.
After you made all manual changes and the meeting room finally accepted it, if you make any changes to the series, everything is reset and the manual adjustments starts all over
If you have to move one or two specific instances to a different room, you can't! You can move in time or cancel an instance, but using the next available room is not possible. Both rooms will decline
Important emails from contacts I had for years flagged as spam.
New Outlook pretends to support RSS, but there's no way to trigger an update. You read your feeds on Microsoft's schedule or not at all.
Being secretly not updating because it thinks it's disconnected, so I have to notice that little icon by the inbox to know it's just not telling me about meetings being scheduled and such
I learned the hard way that "Delay Send" only sends when you launch the desktop client after the chosen time, instead of just sending at the chosen time like you'd expect.
Outlook doesn't use email addresses to route e-mail with Exchange servers. Instead it uses some internal "address" that is longer than the actual e-mail address. This becomes a problem when an e-mail account is deleted and then recreated later. And the old internal address is still in some users Outlook addressbook. Because the internal address changes when the account is recreated.
- Randomly removes email addresses I use every day from the auto-complete forcing me to type them literally in full for weeks until it remembers them again.
- A colleagues name starts "tom..." but it ALWAYS auto-completes with another colleague "tim...". Every single time.
- Search sucks. Not sure if this particular complaint is just our company setup but for some reason it hides stuff older than a given date "on the server" which means you have to remember exactly where stuff is & open the folder before it displays the contents rendering search pointless. Absolutely hopeless
It's the worst program in all of the Office Suite.
I digress. The worst office suite program is Publisher.
I have never ever user it for anything, but for some fucking reason any company PC has it as a default program for .pub files, and that means that everyone that creates a new key pair and opens the pub file to copy it the gets lost and need special instructions to close that fucking thing and to open the file with notepad or something.
Fuck that program for choosing pub as their extension.
Not being able to unpin email chains unless you change it to non-threaded replies, select all, unpin, then go back to threaded replies like a civilized lifeform. Otherwise it just repins the chain when it refreshes.
Our office also uses teams phones which still don't have a way to show missed calls. We literally cannot call people back if we don't get to the med room phone in time.
Like 2 years ago the search was really good. I'm always using referencing or updating all documents. So being able to find them quickly is a huge help in my day to day.
The search bar used to work almost instantly and find anything matching the title or even content in any document I wanted. Now even typing in the exact title doesn't pull up the document I'm looking for half the type.
One thing that I hate about it is, if a notification pops up and you are on a different screen or in a different app, when you mouse over the notification to click it to go away, rather than sending the notification away, it sends it to the background and brings outlook to the front.
So you then have to minimize outlook or move it out of the way to get to the notification screen to close the notification screen.
Also it continuously disables extensions because it's so fucking prioritized on minimizing boot-up time that it does not give a single fuck about how much extra time you have to waste re-enabling the goddamn extensions that you need in order to do your job.
We're paying good money for these extensions.
We want them.
We don't care about 1.3 fucking seconds of time it takes for Outlook to start up as long as we have the functionality, and Microsoft's Outlook keeps disabling them.
If this were a single computer, it would be a hassle. But this is company-wide, having to constantly train and go over how to re-enable the extensions that we need to keep enabled in order for our employees to do their fucking job that we're paying Microsoft $25 a month per person for.
or how about how Microsoft forces, Microsoft accounts to be created, but won't allow Microsoft accounts to be created using organization credentials.
But then it goes behind your back and creates a Microsoft account for every single organization credential.
And then it hides that from you inside of Edge so that you first have to remove the organization credential from Edge and then do a search and then remove the organization credential from being inside of Edge just to stop Edge from having an organization credential that it uses to track every single user in your organization and every single thing that they do.
So yeah, fuck Microsoft.
When you have the calendar open it refreshes and blinks while it does that, like every 15 minutes. This never happened with 2016
And people pay through the nose for that crap?
Adding a group. You can now only add one email address at a time. Got a group of 100? Best clear your afternoon.
Unreliable search, can't handle one online and one local postbox side by side (both have to be turned to online postbox), it messes up my contacts every chance it gets, rules don't work on the online postboxes,... And everything is so slow!
I am so happy with my Linux setup, but for this one costumer I have to use this shitty piece of software.
The new version written in JavaScript and spite. Everything about that.
OneDrive crashes not only the original computer I had the problem on, but the replacement computer that I got (upgrade) as well. Then when I moved to a different office, it crashed another computer and then created the same problem for the one other person using the computer.
And by crashing, I mean the second it tries to do anything everything freezes, and the only way to get out of it is a hard reset.
So OneDrive.
Are we talking about Outlook or "New Outlook"? Everyone that I've heard that switch to new Outlook has had nothing but pain that you can't "do the thing" you used to any more. Like "Meeting with All".
It's made by raccoons that live in a PCP factory dumpster. Also why the fuck do we need 4 different teams applications
Fuck Microsoft.
I have two instances open for two different inboxes and try to pull one up on the taskbar, the wrong instance will pull up every single time without fail.
That sounds like how everyone always guesses wrong which way to plug in USB, not a specific problem with outlook.
Labels should be the default but UI designers on all platforms only care about appearance. Googling says you can change the taskbar to not combine instances and show labels. That way you always know what you are clicking.
Everything, fuck microsoft.
You can't AND/OR combine filters. If i want to move stuff into "Gitlab trash" automatically, I need to use different rules instead of one with multiple applying conditions
Honestly what doesn't annoy me? The list is pretty short. I've never used Outlook before my work, I'm used to Gmail. Outlook feels remarkably shit for something so commonly used. Microsoft ia horrible at UI design imo. I can never find what I need and things that are supposed to be simple are somehow very convoluted.
Jesus. Basically everything about it. We use the web client at work, so might be a different set of annoyances.
deep breath I use slashes in 70% of the e-mails I write as the punctuation mark that they are - I have never and will never want it to start randomly guessing what files I want to attach to the e-mail when I type a slash.
I actually didn't hate that if you typed something like "23rd" it would make the rd super-script - until the day it started doing it so incredibly wrong that it would super-script the '3' and the 'r' and change the 'd' to a 'th' so it read "23rth".
Several times per day it will show a folder name in bold with a number in parenthesis telling me I have new messages in that folder, but when I click on the folder it highlights nothing as new messages, so I have to just remember what the last message I actually read was. Search sucks. Rarely can I open attachments. I told a coworker just yesterday that if they want to keep something secret from me, their best bet is to put the secret in an e-mail attachment and e-mail it to me.On the new Outlook, clicking on emails that pop up opens them... in the background. Insane design choice
For some reason, opening attachments is a lot more painful that it needs to be in open emails.
Maybe there is an option to remove "open file in browser" but if there is I haven't found it. Awful, awful design
The minimize button closes the application.
When you try to change views in a shared calendar, and it automatically switches to your personal calendar in the other view, causing you to go back to the first view, change calendars, then do the exact same thing again.
Every. Damn. Time.
Also cached exchange mode is a disaster...
Trying to find the search button, depending on what you have open it is hidden completely.
Its popularity.
Sometimes tasks go to the trash randomly. It doesn’t happen consistently enough to see what causes it.
That I cannot export mailboxes to other clients. Screw .ost !
That it will automatically try to disable com add-ons even if you tell it not to or create a group policy that tells it not to disable certain add-ons. Still on some machines they will disable. Disabling and re-enabling them from the list often won't fix the issue as you have to first re-enable them in another menu. If neither work then you have to completely re-install the add-on.
honestly their office suite is something I feel they did overall pretty well with. Granted plenty of changes and little things that aggravate me but hard to say as Im not actively using it. Outlook and excel in particular are standouts.
I started using Outlook365 in browser during the pandemic, and never switched back. Not that much better, but I prefer the web app running in Firefox to the actual program.
Plus, at this point, if I even opened Outlook proper, Windows would probably freeze while trying to index all of the emails that have come and gone since the last time I opened it.
Idk why MS lets you use add-ins but then they go and disable it if it starts misbehaving according to Microsoft's determination of it doing so and not the actual add-in causing problems. OH—and then guess what? You can't fucking enable every add-in. For some, you can only tell Outlook to not disable it for a month and then it's the same thing all over again. Fucking Microsoft!
EDIT:
Also, who is the bird brain that decided it was a good idea to force add-ins to be managed partially via the browser? Like if I click one of the manage Add-in buttons in the Outlook app, it works just in Outlook but the other one opens up browser.
Also also, why tf are there 2 different Outlook apps now? Why should an image have Outlook New and Outlook Classic? Why tf does the mail app even exist at this point?
When I click in the search-box in the titlebar, Outlook freezes for about 5 seconds.
You can't cut and paste an appointment.
I tried making a template the other day. I was successful, but it's multiple clicks whenever I want to use it. There's no way to customize the ribbon and add a button to use my new template.
Having to use Outlook was a significant contributor to me leaving my last job.