Microsoft's Many Outlooks Are Confusing Users 61
The Register's Richard Speed reports: Baffled by the plethora of Outlook options out there? You aren't alone. Microsoft veteran Scott Hanselman posted a list of some more variants that could be used to do the same thing. It's a problem common to several Microsoft products. A file needs to be opened, but which app should be used? Should it be Outlook New, or Outlook (New)? With tongue firmly in cheek, Hanselman listed some more options: Outlook (Zero Sugar), Outlook (Caffeine Free), and so on. Hanselman, Developer Community veep at Microsoft, also included Outlook '95, although to our mind the peak came with the version of Outlook in Office 97. A happier, more trusting time when security was less important.
While users can create multiple Outlook profiles to store email account details and data locations, Hanselman's post on Bluesky highlights an issue facing many users of Microsoft's software: which incarnation of the application to use. Teams users often find themselves presented with a variety of applications -- Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Teams (Personal), for example, can often appear side by side in the system tray. [...]
There is a cautionary tale about what happened when a soft drinks company tried to replace a well-liked product with a "new" version and renamed the previous preferred version as "classic." The list posted by Hanselman -- who is also notable for tips on managing Microsoft's personal information manager -- is amusing, but also highlights the perils of having multiple, similarly functioning options to do the same thing, and the potential for confusing users.
While users can create multiple Outlook profiles to store email account details and data locations, Hanselman's post on Bluesky highlights an issue facing many users of Microsoft's software: which incarnation of the application to use. Teams users often find themselves presented with a variety of applications -- Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Teams (Personal), for example, can often appear side by side in the system tray. [...]
There is a cautionary tale about what happened when a soft drinks company tried to replace a well-liked product with a "new" version and renamed the previous preferred version as "classic." The list posted by Hanselman -- who is also notable for tips on managing Microsoft's personal information manager -- is amusing, but also highlights the perils of having multiple, similarly functioning options to do the same thing, and the potential for confusing users.
More suck, please. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, and Outlook does not synchronize with Teams properly, and Teams meetings may or may not work properly depending on the phase of the Moon, and teams is _really_ bad on the iPad, and you never know where files are in Teams (in Chat, Sharepoint?, and I have to click so many times to get what I want, and even more to download it) and on and on and on.
I marvel at Microsoft to turn what already has been a raging dumpster fire into a much bigger combined CF/dumpster fire. That takes skill and a lot of resources! Chapeau! At this point I am especially critical of Teams which, with luck, works maybe 90% if the time. I often wonder whether it is actually controlled by gremlins/China/Russia, and not Microsoft.
Nuff' said. I am just amazed people pay for this & companies flock to it ....
Re:More suck, please. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd be happy if teams let me copy a whole message without adding non breaking spaces (or whatever it is they use) and information about who sent it and the time.
Makes sharing code snippets a PITA.
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I'd be happy if Teams let me save a file where I wanted to instead of dictating where everything goes. And the nonsense with "uploading" a file if you're talking to someone. You're not "uploading" anything. You're adding it or attaching it to your message.
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Well:
Microsoft's Many Outlooks Are Confusing Users
I am pretty sure those users were already pretty confused in the first place when they decided to use any flavor of Outlook to begin with.
Maybe the same applies for Teams? /s
Re:More suck, please. (Score:4, Insightful)
If I'm not mistaken, "Teams for Work" and the personal version of Teams (called just "Teams") were recently combined into a single product - also called "Teams".
This combined "Teams" was then renamed "Teams (Classic)" about a year ago, when they decided to bring out "Teams (new)", which is yet another Teams.
All of these 3 pieces of software may be called just "Teams" when installed, and may or may not be able to install alongside eachother.
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They definitely need to improve here. Where is Teams New (Classic) and Teams Classic (New)?
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I'm going with user error there (or rather admin error). You've described a problem I've literally never had, which is saying something because the current state of Outlook and Teams is just an absolute clusterfuck. That said I don't doubt your experience is real. Microsoft somehow creates the least consistent software on the planet where two systems installed on identical hardware at the same time can experience different software problems right after first boot.
The whole never knowing where your files are
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When I first used Word and Co (no idea if Excel existed then - or how it was called), in late 1987, it was easy intuitively to use.
Not a single manual to read to grasp how to use it. You just did it.
Now, with those "rulers" and naming conventions for "things" which are hardly indicating what they actually do, you seriously need to do a course.
Anyway, since the office suit costs in my opinion a shit load of money, I switched to Libre Office completely. Which is arguable not much better. Also dying the "featu
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They should just get rid of Outlook and give Teams an integrated message reader - chat and email and whatnot.
Outlook is a dumpster fire, has always been, will always be.
Teams, for all its flaws, at least tries to make things easier to use.
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They should just get rid of Outlook and give Teams an integrated message reader - chat and email and whatnot.
Zawinski's Law strikes again!
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Outlook and Teams work great, but only in a fully Microsoft environment. Teams files are shared into Sharepoint, Outlook meetings and Teams are synchronized with Exchange, etc.
The problem is when all that integration isn't there, it all falls apart. Like using Teams for personal use (which everyone using Skype will have to do). Or in a non-Exchange environment, then things fall apart rapidly.
The many Outlook versions doesn't help matters either since people confuse it with the real Outlook that works with E
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Right now Microsoft is a mess in what they deliver - many different products with the same name with different subflavuors with no clear way to distinguish between them.
One fun thing you can do is to add a link to Sharepoint into your OneDrive directory at work. You might think that you could remove that link by selecting it and doing a Shift+Delete. The end result is that it won't just remove the link but everything the link points to as well. Just imagine the fun that would ensue when you have deleted a h
Solution (Score:3)
Re: Solution (Score:2)
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Alpine here for day to day use. I also have roundcube if somebody wants me to look at his cat pictures without having to save the file in Alpine.
Suggestions for Microsoft (Score:3)
1. Stop pushing for 2 year Long Term Support (LTS) releases as a way to force people to upgrade and avoid maintenance costs. For example, .net, Visual Studio 2019 which somehow couldn't build .NET 6 applications without manually hacking the configuration files
2) Stop pushing all things to connect to the cloud or internet. Build products with a "disable and hide cloud links and features" toggle in the configuration
3) Stop building products which do not remember user configuration, like Teams, if you logout
Microsoft here (Score:4, Insightful)
We consulted our bean counters and MBAs and their answer was: Hell NO.
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Congrats! (Score:5, Insightful)
By putting up with all the shit Microsoft does in Windows, you have given them carte blanche to do anything, no matter how obnoxious to users. You've worked hard to ignore all the bad stuff, making excuses, or applying fixes, and then stubbornly continuing on with Microsoft products. Now all this hard work is finally paying off with a plethora of increasingly shitty versions of old software. Notepad was simple and worked but now you get notepad with AI [slashdot.org]!
Congrats on sticking it out this long, you've earned this.
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Earned what? Silly complaints? The story has nothing to do with quality of software, just confusing consumer options. You think Linux with it's 100 different distros will be better for consumers?
As to your complains about Notepad they are founded in ignorance. Notepad still is simple. It's most complex feature is tabs and the fact that it'll temporarily write your work to the temp folder to retain unsaved work. Notepad doesn't do AI, it doesn't do spell checking, what it does do is call OS APIs which handle
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If it's at work then you don't have to deal with any of this because IT has already selected what you are going to use. Your point is moot.
Leave it to Microsoft (Score:2)
Leave it to Microsoft to make an email program horribly complicated.
It was a solved problem. A PIM (Personal Information Manager) was relatively simple and effective back in the PalmOS era. Mostly it relied on office metaphors of having a calendar, datebook, contact file/rolodex, etc.
In Microsoft's defense, HCL Domino (Lotus Notes) isn't any easier. It's a kind of program pretty much every office worker uses, including the programmers, but they are written like nobody has a clue about its use cases and work
What? Just wait for Windows 12 (Score:3)
With 3D printed quantum AI which will require a modest entire computer upgrade, and you will finally have the functionality of a 1980s 16 bit desktop computer!
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3D printed mobile quantum AI. Get it right!
Re: What? Just wait for Windows 12 (Score:2)
with a blockchain
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What the hell are you larping about? I printed all quantum AI 4D with my HP Epson directly to WiFi and all it spit out was 1080P confusion.
Next, I checked my connection on the moon. It was 100000000% perfect. But I noticed a slight bit of lag. So I unplugged the WiFi, and replugged it to nothing, and now everything is fine.
Re: What? Just wait for Windows 12 (Score:2)
5G brings everything stars and aliens whisper to me directly to my brain.
And the best version.. (Score:3)
The best version of Outlook, IMO, was the free Outlook Express.
It just did the job of email quite nicely. Don't really need bells and whistles with an email client.
Re: And the best version.. (Score:2)
Am I the only one who remembers a free addon some Russian hackers made to Outlook Express? It was called Fidolook and added many features to OE. It was great. It was a time when Russian hackers were not the enemy.
This problem isn't just outlook (Score:2)
How many people without looking it up can tell me the difference between "OneDrive by Microsoft Corporation" and "Microsoft OneDrive"?
How many people know the difference between "Microsoft OneNote" and "OneNote for Windows 10" as well as "OneNote 2016" (this is a trick question, two of them are the same.
People still use Outlook?? (Score:1)
Let's just say... (Score:4, Funny)
...that with so many versions, their outlook is rather unfavourable.
The New Cloud Office Suite Shitshow (Score:3, Insightful)
The entire Office 365 suite (which I think is "Microsoft 365" now?) is going downhill. Excel and the rest have become enshittified by relying on their funky far-off cloud for everything.
There's no reason an application should take 20-30 seconds to draw a window on launch. Even if it's wandering around up in the clouds somewhere trying to find the file. Sometimes it never draws the window at all. And there's no way to tell if you have to task-kill or just sit and wait a while longer.
I'm not sure how they managed to make me long for the days of Windows 7 and Office 2007, other than they somehow managed to make something worse.
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Totally agree - I find Outlook unusable these days
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They certainly are helping to sell LibreOffice. Its app start up in nothing flat. Excel takes forever and then another forever now.
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There's no reason an application should take 20-30 seconds to draw a window on launch.
I agree. Which is why it's strange that *you* have this problem. I'm forced to use Microsoft 365 at work (LibreOffice at home) but none of the applications take 20-30 seconds to draw the window on launch even on my horrendously shit low budget work laptop. And none of these applications depend on the cloud to do any work either, all of them just functioning perfectly fine completely severed from any network (oh but the copilot button is greyed out, which I find a plus actually).
I'm not sure how they managed to make me long for the days of Windows 7 and Office 2007, other than they somehow managed to make something worse.
Presumably sometime recently
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The delay may be under 10 seconds when opening Excel bare, but opening anything from OneDrive (even files cached to SSD) throws it into that 20+ range. The cloudier it gets, the worse it gets.
If your employer lets you, you might be able to pare back some of the bloat in Excel. But plenty buy into the full cloud stack MS is pushing. The deeper you buy into that stack, the worse it gets. Consider yourself lucky if you haven't had to deal with Intune, Azure AD, and Sharepoint.
Microsoft's Office Products... (Score:2)
The best Outlook (Score:5, Insightful)
The best Outlook is Thunderbird.
New Outlook is phishing scam (Score:1)
So far nobody has pointed out that Outlook New is just rebranded Windows Mail. They are blatantly forcing users to give their email accounts passwords to Microsoft. Microsoft accesses user mailbox even when user is not using application. If user sends email to "email service provider server", Outlook (new) is not sending email to provider server. It is sending that email to Microsoft.
Where is my PST (Score:2)
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.PST files are really more a thing of the past, with .OST files being where Outlook has the data. If you go to the Windows Control Panel, then Mail, you can go to your profile to see what the datafile(s) are.
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Eye 4 1 (Score:1)
People can't even figure out why they are confused (Score:2)
Back in the days of Windows XP, you had Outlook Express that came with Windows, then you had Outlook. No confusion. Then, Windows 7 changed the name of Outlook Express to Windows Live Mail. Again, no confusion between Windows Live Mail and Outlook. Then you had just "Mail" for Windows 8, 8.1, and Windows 10, and still, no confusion.
The move to making multiple e-mail clients, Outlook, Outlook New, and variations is where the confusion comes in. The "New" Outlook is garbage. Sure, it adds some new
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Seriously, had someone ask for the email with their anime characters at the top.
people trapped by microsoft.. (Score:2)
Come to papa!
It will always be "Lookout" rather than "Outlook" (Score:2)
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The Melissa [wikipedia.org] virus/worm.
look out (Score:2)
Thank heavens for Dale Evans. Er, I mean thank heavens i don't have some corporate overlord forcing me to use Outlook.
I've been afraid of clicking the "Try new Outlook" (Score:2)
I've been afraid of clicking the "Try the new Outlook" switch.
Is the "new Outlook" an Electron/WebView2 fake web app like Teams and Slack (and Discord, etc.)?
the real outlook problem is MS Word (Score:2)
When you are involved in making an email editor, targeting Outlook while wanting to take advantage of 15 years of HTML/CSS improvements is just insane. We're still doing table layouts, not able to style hr dividers (so we use a border-top div hack instead of hr and it is ugly when dashed/dotted), there's the whole 'fab 4' process for an email that looks good mobile and desktop...but then there's /partial/ support for html5 on outlook for the web, but not everybody is there yet. Many are still on desktop '16
Don't forget the worst of them all (Score:2)
Namely, outlook for iOS. I've been forced to use this (along with outlook for windows on my work laptop) for years and it never gets better. It generally gets at least one update a week from Microsoft to patch the various security holes that are constantly being found.
What's so awful? We can start with the terrible search system. We can continue on with the complet
Teams! (Score:2)
Why is this so diffic