Reasons that Outlook Sucks wanderingstan.Outlook frustrated the hell out of me when I began using it a year ago, so I started keeping a list.Here is that list.Sections Composing Email Reading Email Search Slowness Usability Misc Aesthetics.Composing Email. 1.If your organization does not allow individual users to download and install software, there are other options available.If you require any option other than Auto.No real time spellcheck like every other email program on the planet.Underlining misspelled words is a worldwide software standard.New-features-coming-to-Outlook-on-the-web-2-1024x511.png' alt='Call Back Option In Microsoft Outlook' title='Call Back Option In Microsoft Outlook' />Firefox, Thunderbird, Open.Office, and a host of other free software packages have figured out how to do this.But apparently this exotic technology is beyond the grasp of Outlook developers.Sure you can use MS Word as your editor to get this effect, but I for one am not going to buy a 1.MB 5. 00 program just to get a feature that is now a commodity. Dragon Age Ii Black Emporium Dlc . Doesnt suggest people from your Contacts.Why do I need to be told that I havent sent a mail while Im in the middle of writing it Unclear when mails are actually sent.This is especially true for emails with large attachments.E. g. Youre in a hurry to catch a flight but need to send off those screen shots first.You fire off an email and hit send, do one last check of your calendar, put the computer to sleep and rush off for your flight.Not until the next morning do you wake up and realize that the folks in Europe have been waiting 8 hours for your mail and arent happy.Unlike Thunderbird or other apps that give you a progress bar for big emails, in Outlook you have just the tiny status text at the bottom and no warning if the computer sleepshibernates before the message is sent.Doesnt learn which addresses I actuallyuse.Outlook 2. 00. 7E.I have to manually scroll down and select Dan Jones every time I mail him daily, because Dan Mc.Clellan an acquaintance I email maybe once a year is always the first choice.Doesnt learn which addresses I actuallyuse.Outlook 2. 00. 3Doesnt automatically find email addresses that youve written to before, or have emailed you.Even free email clients like Thunderbird can do this.In Outlook you must create a contact in order for it to recognize any address.I dont want to make a contact for everyone I might email more than once.No easy way to choose which of multiple addresses you want to write to.You have to wait for it to guess How long of a wait Mysterious selection of address for recipient Outlook 2.Once a name is recognized God knows when that magically happens, and the person has multiple addresses, you dont know which one it picked.Because it never shows email addresses You have to double click the name to find out what it picked.Broken auto guessing of names Outlook 2.You type in a name, and it doesnt do any auto complete.In fact, sometimes you dont know who its going to pick until you hit send or proactively hit the Find Names button if the person you want isnt yet in your contacts, but someone of a similar name is, youve just emailed the wrong person Outlook 2.Because you wouldnt want people to be able to work any fasterSee this thread on Lockergnome.No concept of nicknames like every other email program on the planet.Why cant I email my friend Daniel Newman with just Danny, as I refer to him, without losing the fact in my contact info that his legal name is Daniel Its always copying formatting I dont want.It takes four clicks and a dialog box to do paste text without the original formatting.Horribly frustrating when youre trying to copy text from the browser as a quotation in an email.Without your email looking like shit.Further, it is impossible to add keyboard shortcut for pasting unformatted text.See below And just to make damn sure it remains impossible, there is no command for this in built in macro language, so even a determined nerd like myself cant create a keyboard macro.In Outlook 2. 00.Pasting in a line from anywhere else like the browser will leave you with that line looking different than the rest and you looking like an idiot.Even worse, after pasting there is no way remove all the formatting on a text so that it matches a normal message composition.Only solution is to first paste into notepad, then copy n paste again into message.Impossible to remove formatting from a reply.If you are composing a reply to an email and want to remove formatting bold, italic, etc.It should reset you to the normal format blue Calibri font, but instead it gives you a totally different format black Times New Roman.This is especially bad since it is so damn hard to paste text without formatting.See above1. 3. Embedded images mysteriously enlarged or resized.Mysterious errors from programs I dont own.No way to edit HTML code of email and strange mucking with HTML you paste in.Impossible to compose an email that links to images rather than embedding them.E. g. I composed a message in Nvu specifically because I wanted the message to link to images not embed them in the email.But when I pasted the message into Outlook, it automatically re wrote all the links, downloaded the large images, and sent off a 8 megabyte email without asking me if thats what I wanted.Interrupts your email writing while it checks for new messages.If Outlook decides to download messages from exchange while youre in the middle of writing an email, your composition window will freeze without warning and all keystrokes will be lost.I often type without looking at the screen and wont notice for several sentences that Outlook has decided to ignore my typing.Cant re format your message dynamically as you resize the compose email window.If you re size a message while in the middle of composing it, your next is not re flowed dynamicallyonly after youve let go of the mouse button.Note that Internet Explorer and Firefoxboth free programsfigured out how to do this 6 years ago.Web client looses messages with no possibility to recover.If you hit send after having been unknowingly logged out, your message is not saved.E. g. you start a mail, are then interrupted for a phone call, then later resume your mail and hit send.And because the client does weird stuff with the form, the browser cant recover your message when you go back to the compose page after logging in.There is no way to change the very short time after which you are logged out.Strangely, if you were replying to a message when this happens, Outlook will erroneously indicate that you actually did send a reply.While an externally launched Compose Email window is open, the rest of Outlook is unusable.E. g. Without Outlook open, I select the Send to mail Recipient option of an external program like my text editor.But the recipients name isnt in Outlook Even tho Ive emailed him a million times, but thats another issue So I try to bring up the address book.Impossible. Cant even launch another instance of Outlook.Reading Email. 20.Horrible display of HTML emails Sets email design back 5 yearsFor Outlook 2.Microsoft Word from Internet Explorer, making formatted emails even uglier and less functional.Thats right, they ditched their own web browser, the de facto internet HTML standard, for a word processor.WTF See this excellent article.Notice that they took the worst part of MS Word the rendering engine, but cant figure out how to take the in line spellcheck part Being sarcastic here, of course they just want you to pay them the money for MS Word.Preview pane painfully slow, leading to confusion about what message youre reading.When you click on a message in the inbox, it highlights immediately, but the message doesnt load into the preview pane for many seconds even up to minutes with a slow connection.During this lag time there is no indication that the computer is busy, like the spinner in a browser or the windows hourglass.So you get these confusing situations where inbox list says youre reading a message from Jane but what is displayed is a message from Joe.Cant view messages as conversation.Your sent mails are kept in a seperate folder.So to reconstruct a conversation you have to switch back and forth between your inbox and the sent folder, a task made are the more enjoyable by Outlooks awsomesearch capability.Poor handling of attached messages.If an email has a large number of attached messages, they are displayed in a tiny scrolling pane at the top of the email.
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November 2017
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