Microsoft Office is Epic Fail
As we all know, Microsoft Outlook (I am currently using 2003 11.8169.8172 SP3) is not one of my favorite applications. While I know better than to think there is a way to escape its clutches in an Microsoft Exchange environment, I am still at a loss as to why some things in this application are so horribly done. Here are some examples I face almost daily:
- Open a new email, hit the “To” button to bring up an address book dialog. Select one of your address books (Personal Contacts for example) and then click on the first name in the list. Hit CTRL + A the universal select all. Wow, imagine that, it DOESN’T SELECT ALL?!
- While connected to an Exchange server, lose network connection for 30 seconds or more; just enough time for it to realize it is not connected. Reconnect to the network (this happens to me when my VPN goes dead). Watch the epic fail as it takes upwards of 5 minutes to re-connect and check your mailbox
- Try to determine a message is sent from an official source. This requires checking the “full message headers”. Open the message, go to the view menu. No headers listed?! Ok, try options a completely odd place for such things to be. There at the bottom in a horrible text box with a background color the same as the rest of the window in a non-adjustable font size is the internet headers. Try following the message path.
- Open your calendar, go to month view. Double click on a day (not an event). It opens a new event dialog which is quite logical. Why it decides to set it to an ALL DAY event is beyond me in a business tool. How often do we schedule full day events as opposed to an hour meeting etc?
I am sure there are others, but these are just the ones I’ve dealt with in the past 1.5 hours.
Originally posted at The WaxNation. Please leave any comments there. Posts on The WaxNation are written by either Kate or Dave Waxman; however livejournal can not display the author details thus to determine its author you must visit the original post.