Thursday, November 14, 2013

For Your Convenience (or, why your hatred of Microsoft burns with the fire of a thousand exploding stars)

You notice it first when you open any of the Microsoft Office 2013 products. A flat, white, featureless expanse greets you. A harbinger of experience to come.

As you attempt to use familiar products, you find things missing. Maybe my feature is no longer the default, and I have to explicitly enable it, you naively think. After a few hours of scouring support sites and hapless google searches you find a post from a support person who explains that your feature is no longer available at all. Not even as an option. 

Why, you ask? For your convenience, is the answer.

In Word, there used to be an excellent right-menu feature applicable to misspelled words: Add to Autocorrect. If there was a word you consistently fumble-fingered, you could right-click on it and, with Add to Autocorrect, never have to worry about misspelling it ever again.

But with Word 2013, this handy feature was removed. It is not available as an option. It is not available as an extension. It is not available as an "app" from the "Office App Store". It is an ex-feature.

What is Microsoft's reason for doing this? "It was too confusing to have so many choices available on the right-menu". Really?? "Too confusing" to be able to do what you want to do??

If you ask them why this feature was removed, they will respond:

We recommend you submit feedback about the requirement to our product team. Many features of current programs were designed and upgraded based on customers’ feedback.

Today I ran into a similar dead feature in Office 365 Outlook Web App (OWA). I always use OWA if I need to have an in-house client email address. It keeps things clean and separate. OWA gradually improved over the years, reaching a pinnacle in 2011 with an interface effectively indistinguishable from the installed Outlook client.

But Office 365 Outlook has changed that. Email message display no longer has a toolbar where you can click an arrow for "next message". No longer can you move a message to a subfolder.

And no longer can you add a specific date/time reminder to the email. Think of it. A feature of email that has been around since the dawn of time has been removed, "for your convenience".

You can set a reminder on an email to be reminded "today" or "tomorrow" or "next week" whatever that means. But if the email is pertinent to something that needs to happen 8am Monday? Nope. Can't do that anymore.

What is Microsoft's recommendation if you want to set a specific date/time reminder? Do they have a work-around, perhaps? Maybe an app from the "Office App Store"?

Jason Jiang of Microsoft Support helpfully suggests:

We recommend you submit feedback about the requirement to our product team. Many features of current programs were designed and upgraded based on customers’ feedback.

Thanks, Jason. Really appreciate that helpful response.