Archive for the 'Outlook' Category

Control-F in Microsoft Outlook

admin on May 28th 2008

In virtually every application I use, including Lotus Notes, Control-F brings up the Find dialogue. This seems to be the default behaviour for Windows applications. There is an exception though - Microsoft Outlook. In Outlook 2007, Control-F is the keyboard shortcut to forward a message. So, Microsoft has broken their own UI standard. Why? They didn’t need to, they already have a keyboard shortcut for forwarding - Alt-W.

Unfortunately, it appears that the User Interface Hall of Shame isn’t being maintained any more. Otherwise this would rate a mention.

It’s just not good enough!

Filed in Microsoft, Outlook | 2 responses so far

Outlook, HTML, Plain Text and Replies

admin on Apr 16th 2008

I currently use Microsoft Outlook 2007 at work. On the whole, it’s ok, but sometimes I do find it frustrating. The problem I’m having at the moment is when I try to reply to an email and I want to make inline comments.

Now it appears that Outlook replies in what ever format the original email was sent in. That’s fine if the original email was plain text. Then each line in the original email will be indented and prefixed with the “>” character. I can just add my comments where I want:

Plain Text Reply

However, if the original email was sent in HTML, then my reply will be in HTML. The problem with that is that it’s less obvious where my comments are:

HTML Reply

I can convert the reply to plain text. But that’s even worse as I don’t get the indenting:

HTML Converted To Plaintext Reply

It shouldn’t be this hard. It’s just not good enough.

Filed in Microsoft, Outlook | No responses yet