Excuse this cathartic rant about the horror that is the Outlook Web Access user interface.

But there are two tiny things that get in the bloody way every time I fire it up and just drive me crackers.

The first is the box of recently / frequently used email addresses. It has a scroll bar. At the top and bottom, arrows, a little box showing how far down you are, and the space around the little box. Normally with such technology the top and bottom arrows let you scroll up line by line, and the space around the box lets you scroll through the data page by page. But with OWA, the two different places to click do exactly the same thing. Clicking in the space around the box moves the data down line by line. Clicking on the arrows moves the data down line by line. IT SHOULDN’T BE LIKE THAT!!!

Two of the people I email most frequently are called Susan, and are close to the bottom of the list. So EVERY DAY I have to scroll through the email box to find their details, and every day it irks me that the box just doesn’t work properly.

The second thing — oooh, how it irks! This is not a problem when using it from home and Chrome, but using it on Outlook at work where that’s the only browser choice it comes up on a daily basis. I’m the sort of web user who always deliberately has dozens of tabs or browser windows open at once. There are 10 at the top of this page as I type and another three in the computer one foot to the left.

If you go to the menu, File > new says that if you press Ctrl-N you get a new window. A new browser window full of browsery goodness where you can go and look at other websites.

So, frequently, I do precisely that. I press Ctrl-N. And do I get a new browser window? Do I buggery. I get a new blank email. I didn’t want a new blank email, I wanted a new browser window, so when the keyboard short cut fails me, I have to go back into the menu to get the new browser window I actually wanted and needed. And there, smugly smirking at me, is the same little line of text that erroneously tells you that the short-cut for a new browser window is Ctrl-N. IT LIES!

Grrrr.