Microsoft Outlook 2016… Sigh…

As part of my day to day work I find my self forced into a Windows 7, Microsoft Office environment. This is already painful enough having to slog through the crippling security restrictions imposed on me by corporate InfoSec and IT standards (totally reasonable, just slows everything down), but really Microsoft, It’s 2018, and when I hit ‘Ctrl+f’ on my keyboard that doesn’t fucking mean I want a new email, it means (As in standard EVERYWHERE) I want to search, either in the email I’m reading (NOT GLOBALLY).

Additionally, there is seemingly still no way to perform a very basic feature of allowing for custom key mapping. It’s completely unreasonable that Windows in general lacks this most basic of features.

Lastly, Outlook apparently has no ability to allow for true WYSIWYG text editing and lacks the ability to allow for standard inline commenting:

>> Grand Parent Message
>Parent
Your message

Instead you’re presented with clumsy options to add [WHATEVER] some text inserted directly into the message, so when any normal email client reads it, the reply you’re making is lost:

>>> Grand Parent message
>>> [WHATEVER] comment to Grand Parent message
>> Parent
>> [WHATEVER] comment to Parent
> Your old message

instead of what you would expect to see:

>>> Grand Parent Message
your inline comment
>> Parent
something about parent
> Most recent message

The reason every email program on the planet (except of course Outlook) uses this convention is because it is the natural way to converse and build a conversation with one or more people.

Microsoft would rather you write an essay response with selective quoting and editing, composing a short story as we would have done 200 years ago with pen and paper, delivered by horse, boat, or rail over vast amounts of time.

In summary, Outlook is generally terrible, it does nothing well, it’s overall implementation continues to be a crime against humanity, and it’s most basic feature of allowing you to read and compose emails barely works at all.

 

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