Microsoft's marketing people talked up the "new features" of Outlook 2013 claiming how much more "productive" it would make users. Well, they neglected to mention how they deliberately removed one feature that has made me productive in Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 for years. It's the ability to preview the contents of messages that you haven't read yet. (Click on the image above to see what I mean).
The image above is how it would look if the brain-dead idiots in Redmond hadn't decided to remove it. Now I have two equally dubious choices: display a preview of all messages, including the ones I have read, or disable the preview altogether, and use the "preview pane" instead. This is a time waster because I have to click on each message to preview it, and the default is to mark it as "read" once it has been previewed. This is about as clever as it gets.
So if anyone in Redmond with a brain ever gets to see this post, listen up: either make the screen work as shown above, or at least have a "preview unread messges" next to "all" and "unread". In the meantime, can I have a refund for my purchase of Outlook 2013? I was told that it was the last major release of Office, and that from here out subscribers to Office online would get incremental upgrades with new features. So far I have noticed none. More vapourware? In this case some of the features of Office 2010 have evaporated. Huh?Update 26 October 2014: I finally realised that this missing feature is a productivity improvement after all: now that Outlook is more difficult to use, I check my mail less often, which makes me far more productive. Genius!
1 comment:
Well they also removed the ability to import the contacts from Outlook 2010. Why do they keep messing with Outlook? 2010 was the best version but you can't get it anymore.
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