Part 37.1: Signatures in 2010

You gotta hand it to Microsoft. They try. Back in the day I wrote about how impossible it was to figure out where signatures lived in Outlook 2007. There were menus to open and click through to find a major feature buried six levels down.

So in 2010, which I was just upgraded to, I had to find my signature. I was in the main mail window, and started looking. I looked at every bleeding menu. Nowhere to be seen. Finally, I asked a coworker for guidance. He told me to open a new window.

Aha!

If you open a new window, "signatures" is right out in the open, and easy to see and find. This is an improvement. The issue, however, is that this is counterintuitive in two manners. First, it is accessed from a completely different place as in 2007 and before. How hard would it to have a link to signatures out of the main window without opening a new message? So, you know, we can find it. Second, when I start with a new program, I want to set up my signature before I send my first message, not after. Now, I have to open a message, set up my signature, and is it in the message? No. I have to close the message and open another.

So with thousands of hours and lines of code, they have gone from having something completely buried but accessed from the main window, to something not buried at all, but accessed unintuitively from the new message window.

Progress. Maybe by 2020 they'll have signatures readily available in the main window of the program.

Or maybe we'll all be on Gmail.

Part 42: CTRL-F should do one thing and one thing only

Ctrl-F = find. Period. Full stop. End of discussion.

Except, of course, in outlook, where Ctrl-F forwards a copy of the selected message. That's a nice shortcut to have, but considering that Outlook has a find feature (a particularly braindead one, but a find feature nonetheless) it should be called by Ctrl-F. For some unfathomable reason, "Find" is called by Ctrl-E. Let's see where E is in the word "find." F, well, that's not an E. I, it's a vowel, but not an E. N is not an E, and D is close, but as close as F, which is not an E. There is no "E" in Find! Oh, and then, of course, "advanced find" is shift-ctrl-F. Makes a world of sense. Almost as much sense a the underlined letters in

The "w" is underlined in forward, so obviously ctrl-W has nothing to do with forwarding. And the "i" is underlined in find, so "i" makes things italic. Yeah that makes sense. It's nice of them to make alt-I a shortcut for find, but there's still no cross-application compatibility. In other words, ctrl-F should always call the find function. The program-random alt-underlined shortcuts are just annoying.

To recap: to use the "find" function you can use either ctrl-E or alt-I. In a just and loving world, this would not be allowed.

So, maybe Redmond realizes how bad their search is and doesn't want people to find it. It turns out that a surprisingly high number of people have no idea how to use the find function. Probably because they've been using Outlook. (Now, in Gmail, Find actually works, you know, to find things. But that's an entire other post.)

Part 39: Really? I can't use commas to separate email addresses?

So we recently upgraded our server. In addition to a bizarre method to change default printer preferences (which may well be the printer driver's fault so I won't document it here—yet), there's been a subtle change in our how Outlook works. Or, of course, doesn't work.

Let's say I want to email two people. In Gmail, I'd type in their addresses separated by commas, say, "sbrin@gmail.com, lpage@gmail.com". I'd write my message, hit "send" and go on my merry way. And that's how it used to work in Outlook. But not anymore. If I go to send an email in outlook, I can't write it to "bgates@microsoft.com, pallen@microsoft.com". Oh, no-siree-bob. If I do something that intuitive, I get an error message:

Wait, what? I can't separate email addresses with a comma? And, smartypants, since you obviously know what I was doing (i.e. that I was separating emails with commas) why can't you just make the goddamn change for yourself!

Oh, yes, Windows = productivity.

Part 38: Word/Outlook integration

While we're knocking Outlook, what's the deal with the integration of Word and Outlook? Sometimes, I'm typing away in Outlook and get a message that Word needs to close, and since Outlook uses Word to edit applications, Word's crashing has rendered Outlook braindead, so carry on.

Also, it's so very well integrated that when I was editing my signature, I had a section which was 10 point Verdana italic, which refused to show in 10 point font in the actual email. Oh, yes, Word works so well I want to use it all the time!

Part 37: Can Outlook signatures be any harder to find?

So work decided that we should all have standardized signatures and can we all change them. Fine, whatever, I should be able to find out where to change signatures, right? They're a pretty generic part of email, so it's not like Outlook will hide the signature in an incoherent menu which is impossible to find. In a just and loving world, it would be on a main menu. Now, of course, Windows won't show me the whole menu if I haven't used it recently (thanks), but even if I have to expand the menus, I bet I can find it, right?

Wrong.

Now, in Gmail, where I don't even use a signature, I can find the signature setting easily. I click on settings, then, oh, hey, look! It's right there! Right on the main front screen! One click! Easy.

In Outlook? Oh, boy. I had to look it up on the Interwebs. First, I go to the tools menu. There, I select options. Now, leaving beside the fact that options shouldn't be under a tools menu (since an option isn't a tool) or should be called something out, I am presented with a mess of tabs and interfaces. I got to this without the web. But I didn't see "signature" on any of the tabs, so I kept going.

Had I clicked through all the tabs, I would have found that the mail format tab contains the signature dialogue. I have no idea what all the other functions Outlook has which are so very important, but the signature dialogue is in an not-at-all-obvious place, and is much further down the information tree than it should be. Then again, other than save and print, is there anything you can do without three menus and a dialogue box in Windows?

Part 35: hidden formatting

I had a bit of an email I wanted to post in to Facebook. I figured the steps would be copy-paste-post, right? Not so fast.

It turns out Outlook had embedded some really hidden line breaks in to the text. So I wasn't just copying the text, but I was copying the line breaks too. So when
I posted it on Facebook, it didn't look right. In fact, it had random line breaks. It looked sort of something like
this. This was a problem for me because a) Facebook only displays a certain number of lines before saying "read more" and having a link and b) more importantly this was for my work's Facebook page (it's getting
annoying, isn't it?) and it looked ugly. Even more disturbing is that if I copied the text from the email, it would sometimes paste in with a bunch of xml before it. Seriously, come on.

The workaround was to copy everything in to Notepad (one of the less braindead windows applications, since it has so few useless features) to get it in to text and then paste it from there. It worked. But it was annoying.

Part 33: One problem, many programs

For some reason, Word decided not to cooperate with me today. It just won't open. And since I was in the middle of writing something, this makes me angry. Oh look at what has happened!



Now, I've had programs freeze before. It happens. On all operating systems. Here's the thing: when something freezes on the Mac, it generally doesn't also freeze other programs. Like Outlook. First I got a message that Outlook used Word for writing emails, and since Word was dead, it was using something else. Then I got an active X error. Now it is frozen. So much for the typing I was doing in Word &c. Time for the three fingered salute.

Part 13: Reply with attachment? No way, Jose.

I get an email from a vendor. They want the email replied to with the attachment they sent.

There is no way in Outlook to easily "reply with attachment" it seems.

No, seriously.

I hate windows.

the vendor responds

I like my mac laptop better then any windows device.

Part 8: Outlook not so good

Outlook has now downloaded each message that I missed in the past week five times and shows no sign of stopping any time soon.

I will now light myself on fire.

[This may have been our braindead mail server, but when in doubt, blame Windows.]

Part 4: Email threads (or why GOOG >>> MSFT)

Suppose I am having an email conversation as follows:

Ari to David
David to Ari
Ari to David
David to Ari
Ari to David

And perhaps then Ari wants to send another email to David without having received an interceding reply.

In Gmail, Ari clicks on "reply" and it's smart enough to figure out that Ari wants to reply to David.

In Outlook, Ari clicks on "reply" and it's so braindead that it thinks that Ari wants to reply to himself!