Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Outlook, no question:

- It hangs all the time for a few seconds at a time,

- The search is moronic (how about you look on the server and on my computer at the same time instead of hanging for a while and then displaying that dumbass message offering the option to search on my computer instead when there's a problem with the connection?),

- Switching to the unread message view regularly results in a progress doofer that never disappears until you switch to a different view and switch back

- The message list font size gets corrupted by moving between Windows of different DPIs forcing you to switch to a different folder then switch back again to make everything readable

- It asks you whether you want to save changes just because you've clicked a link in a calendar appointment

- Got thousands of emails? It's slow, slow, SLOW, SLOW(!!!), SLOOOOOOOOOOW!!!!!

- Too many modal dialogs

- It's clunky as hell when juggling calendar appointments, booking rooms, etc.

- When opening a meeting series it asks me whether I want to open the whole series or a single meeting every single time. Can I just have a modifier key for this, please, so that I can open whichever way I choose without being prompted?

- Inconsistent and unpredictable behaviour when it comes to inserting images as attachments versus inline in an email

- Losing messages in conversation view

- Difficult to follow conversations/find all messages if you don't use conversation view(!)

- Inconsistent behaviour around contact auto-completion: sometimes people end up in the auto-complete list, sometimes they don't

I could go on. I won't.

I've used Outlook at a lot of companies and can't say I share most of these experiences.

10s of thousands of emails? Not slow.

Hangs for a few seconds? Not in my experience.

Whole series vs a single meeting? Only when editing, which makes sense. Opening to grab the conference ID? I don't get asked that question.

I've had to use Outlook in some way for the last 20 years, and I just live with it, but I'm also saying... what you describe hasn't been normal for me for a long time, at a lot of different companies. Maybe it's something to do with whoever runs your Exchange..?

> Maybe it's something to do with whoever runs your Exchange..?

Well it's 365 so that, unfortunately, is Microsoft.

Yeah, same here.

My company has recently switched to G Suite from Office, and I'm actually starting to consider this as an actual perk of working somewhere, just to avoid Office (Outlook above all, but also Sharepoint, etc…).

I used to love Outlook until my work switched over to Office 365 version of Outlook. Now it is driving me nuts. The small things such as the animations when switching between mail and calendar, the way it displays conversations, the way it searches. I could go on, but I think we are on the same sinking boat here.

I think you're right: company I'm with has been using Office 365 since I joined back in 2017. In many ways it's decent but Outlook is just full of small irritations that really start to add up when you find yourself having to spend a lot of time in it.

The last good version of Outlook was 2010. Ever since they re-wrote the UI form 2013 onward, it's got more progressively worse.

The one feature I love about Outlook is that the inbox can be sorted by Received time, ascending. And the list focus defaults to the most recent entry.

Every SMS and email client that has 'most recent on top' as the only view drives me f*g nuts.

I want my oldest conversations on top so I can see which ones have been awaiting a response or are done and can be archived/deleted, but apparently that's not how anybody works anymore.

That’s a really great way to get to emails I’m going to try it

I do that too. Hardcoded defaults is a pain. I acctually like desktop Outlook and I wish it just froze in time forever so I don't have to relearn it. I hate when the UIs are changed and I have to relearn where all the buttons are in a program I don't really care much for.

Ah, I see you have never had the pleasure of using Lotus Notes. These problems might seem insignificant in comparison.

Haha - yes, you're probably right. Company I contracted at a few years ago (and a big enterprise at that) still had a PC running a long unsupported version of Lotus Notes for obscure, but apparently business critical purposes, and it was becoming a huge problem for them. Fortunately not one that fell under the purview of the team I was on.

You should give the online version at https://outlook.com a try. I've been using it since the corona outbreak and it's actually better than the desktop version imo.

The new web-based Outlook 365 is a lot better, but still quite buggy and massively lacking compared to Fastmail.

laughs in Lotus Notes

Wow! Had a CEO once try to convert the company from Gsuit to office/teams so he could use Outlook. Figured it was great...

If you have any third-party Outlook add-ins enabled, you might try disabling them.

There are a lot of poorly written add-ins out there.

It hasn't changed much in the twenty years since I last used it then.

MS Windows, any version except 3.1 or earlier. MS Outlook, MS Word, MS Excel, McAffe crap, KDE, Gnome, Pulseaudio, CMake (you don't need to configure anything). Android any version. MS would be proud to have the same amount of brain damage as in Android. Any Google software.

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