What's something about Microsoft Outlook that drives you crazy?

We are asked to use Projects to manage our work, and we then mapped the project's structure into a folder structure using sharepoint. The thing is, this structure leads to very long file paths, and Windows won't let us open the files using the file explorer because the file path is too long, and so we need to search stuff through sharepoint, download as zip files, and end up breaking the intended organization. The projects page helps create the illusion of organization for the higher-ups but in reality it is a hindrance. We don't have admin access to the computer and so we can't change this file path limit setting. This is just the first that came to mind of an endless list of complaints I have.

It's another Electron app now. At least "New Outlook" is.

Ctrl+f is not find

I am willing to forget pretty much any fault on Outlook when I compare it with the absolute dogshit product that is New Outlook.

Click on a Toast and it opens the email… in the background, never in the foreground.

Have anything other than Email selected (calendar, for example) and it doesn’t display the New Email notification on the tile, so if you didn’t see the toast and have anything other then Outlook open in the foreground, you don’t know you’ve got new email until you physically go back to Outlook and click on the Email button.

Want to send a spreadsheet as an email attachment from within Excel? The option is there, but it doesn’t work any more (and the same for any other native “send via email” option in your OS out applications).

Want to send a document as an attachment? You have to open a new email, then drag the document into the correct half of the email, because if you have it too far to the left, Outlook will upload it into OneDrive and put a link to it in the email.

I could go on, but fuck me, it’s absolutely disgusting how much this breaks any previous workflow you may have had for doing email quickly and efficiently…

Microsoft Outlook

The search function doesn't find anything.

I have to run it through a browser because I'm on Linux and it's constantly logging me out Even when I say don't do it don't ask again just keep me logged in. Nope fuck you log out, and sometimes it gets stuck in a loop where I log in and it logs me out immediately over and over until I clear my cache and reset my browser it's insane

I want to set an OOO. I don’t want the OOO to go to people who are emailing a group or list.

I use the web version and sometimes I'll be typing into the body of an email and it'll interpret my keystrokes as shortcuts outside of that email and start deleting random messages and closing the email I was writing.

Meeting requests tracking, oh my god. It's a great feature but it's got so many quirks.

Once you decline a meeting, it's gone for good in your calendar. If you accidentally declined, you need to ask for another invite. More commonly, plans changed and now you can't attend when you could have because you forgot all about it.

You can't decline important meetings and still see them in your calendar, so people abuse 'tentative' as 'I want to know when this meeting takes place but I won't attend myself'

Can't organize a meeting and then don't attend yourself. Impossible. Neither can you transfer ownership when you're going on holiday for example, so people are stuck with meeting requests nobody can change

Good luck getting a long series of meetings accepted by a meeting room. Every single instance must be available, that's annoying but makes sense. You can cancel or move individual instances until the meeting room accepts it, but everyone gets spammed with invites.

After you made all manual changes and the meeting room finally accepted it, if you make any changes to the series, everything is reset and the manual adjustments starts all over

If you have to move one or two specific instances to a different room, you can't! You can move in time or cancel an instance, but using the next available room is not possible. Both rooms will decline

The fucking thing cannot search. I like to keep my email as conversation mode, but regardless if I get an attachment or I can remember some of the words in the email I would search for it and maybe 10% of the time I would find it.

It's incredibly frustrating how useless the search function is.

The search function is useless

Bullshit left click for spell check now... constantly trying to think for me and distracting me with endless USELESS popups, no spell check in the subject like. It's awful

• Randomly removes email addresses I use every day from the auto-complete forcing me to type them literally in full for weeks until it remembers them again.
• A colleagues name starts "tom..." but it ALWAYS auto-completes with another colleague "tim...". Every single time.
• Search sucks. Not sure if this particular complaint is just our company setup but for some reason it hides stuff older than a given date "on the server" which means you have to remember exactly where stuff is & open the folder before it displays the contents rendering search pointless. Absolutely hopeless

Every once in a while it just decides it's going to completely change the layout, and there's no simple way to get it back to how it was.

It's the worst program in all of the Office Suite.

I digress. The worst office suite program is Publisher.

I have never ever user it for anything, but for some fucking reason any company PC has it as a default program for .pub files, and that means that everyone that creates a new key pair and opens the pub file to copy it the gets lost and need special instructions to close that fucking thing and to open the file with notepad or something.

Fuck that program for choosing pub as their extension.

Setting up calendar events with reminders that never happen. At some point, they just stopped working for me.

One thing that I hate about it is, if a notification pops up and you are on a different screen or in a different app, when you mouse over the notification to click it to go away, rather than sending the notification away, it sends it to the background and brings outlook to the front.

So you then have to minimize outlook or move it out of the way to get to the notification screen to close the notification screen.

Also it continuously disables extensions because it's so fucking prioritized on minimizing boot-up time that it does not give a single fuck about how much extra time you have to waste re-enabling the goddamn extensions that you need in order to do your job.

We're paying good money for these extensions.

We want them.

We don't care about 1.3 fucking seconds of time it takes for Outlook to start up as long as we have the functionality, and Microsoft's Outlook keeps disabling them.

If this were a single computer, it would be a hassle. But this is company-wide, having to constantly train and go over how to re-enable the extensions that we need to keep enabled in order for our employees to do their fucking job that we're paying Microsoft $25 a month per person for.

or how about how Microsoft forces, Microsoft accounts to be created, but won't allow Microsoft accounts to be created using organization credentials.

But then it goes behind your back and creates a Microsoft account for every single organization credential.

And then it hides that from you inside of Edge so that you first have to remove the organization credential from Edge and then do a search and then remove the organization credential from being inside of Edge just to stop Edge from having an organization credential that it uses to track every single user in your organization and every single thing that they do.

So yeah, fuck Microsoft.

As a help desk tech, please don't get me started.

But in the spirit of contributing to this post...focused inbox. No Microsoft, I actually wouldn't like to see all my messages and would prefer if you could hide them from me so I miss important shit and get chewed out by my boss.

Not being able to unpin email chains unless you change it to non-threaded replies, select all, unpin, then go back to threaded replies like a civilized lifeform. Otherwise it just repins the chain when it refreshes.

Our office also uses teams phones which still don't have a way to show missed calls. We literally cannot call people back if we don't get to the med room phone in time.

There's a keyboard shortcut to send an email.

Honestly what doesn't annoy me? The list is pretty short. I've never used Outlook before my work, I'm used to Gmail. Outlook feels remarkably shit for something so commonly used. Microsoft ia horrible at UI design imo. I can never find what I need and things that are supposed to be simple are somehow very convoluted.

I have two instances open for two different inboxes and try to pull one up on the taskbar, the wrong instance will pull up every single time without fail.

That sounds like how everyone always guesses wrong which way to plug in USB, not a specific problem with outlook.

Labels should be the default but UI designers on all platforms only care about appearance. Googling says you can change the taskbar to not combine instances and show labels. That way you always know what you are clicking.

My inbox view gets messed up every now and then and I have to keep resetting it.

Jesus. Basically everything about it. We use the web client at work, so might be a different set of annoyances.
deep breath I use slashes in 70% of the e-mails I write as the punctuation mark that they are - I have never and will never want it to start randomly guessing what files I want to attach to the e-mail when I type a slash.
I actually didn't hate that if you typed something like "23rd" it would make the rd super-script - until the day it started doing it so incredibly wrong that it would super-script the '3' and the 'r' and change the 'd' to a 'th' so it read "2^3rth".
Several times per day it will show a folder name in bold with a number in parenthesis telling me I have new messages in that folder, but when I click on the folder it highlights nothing as new messages, so I have to just remember what the last message I actually read was. Search sucks. Rarely can I open attachments. I told a coworker just yesterday that if they want to keep something secret from me, their best bet is to put the secret in an e-mail attachment and e-mail it to me.