glatt wrote:

1. Disable Backspace Deletion in Reading Pane

• Go to File > Options > Mail.
• Scroll to Outlook Panes > Reading Pane.
• Uncheck “Single key reading using space bar” if enabled (this prevents navigation that might lead to accidental deletion).

Cool, thank you.
I'm not on the same version-- I don't see this an an option to check/uncheck.

Also, the first thing I do with my Outlook client is TURN OFF THE READING PANE.
I only want a list of email titles (and the little preview of the first line). "Reading" an email is ONLY when I click on it-- there's no ambiguity.

...

eta: Something is deeply troubling about this feature existing in the production run of a software that millions of people ar using. AcCiDeNtALLy deleting people's emails due to an inadvetant "navigation" because THE SPACE BAR has macro-features pinned to it. The ƒucking SPACE BAR. 

And-- THEY DIDN'T TEST THIS. Nobody TESTED the software-- "using the software like an end user" .. or they would have noticed this.

Microsoft is releasing BETA software. I know this is true because MS Teams can't add words to the dictionary. They released it in Beta, planning to (maybe) fix features later, like a video game developer.

Last edited by Flint (9/22/2025 2:01 pm)

Shotgun the problem.  12 gauge shells are cheap.

Flint wrote:

Flint wrote:

... MS Teams can't add words to the dictionary. ...

New solution to this issue just dropped-- users won't have to worry about Teams inability to add words to the dictionary because IT JUST DOESN'T DO A SPELLCHECK ANYMORE. Problem "solved"
 

That sux.

I don't care anymore, just because their a'int nothing you can do about it any ways.

Next up, join me for today's episode of "How do I convince MS Teams that there is no new activity?"

1) Click through each chat, clicking in the dialogue box for each, to convince Teams that you have been there. You have seen the chat, you have read the whole thing. All the way to the end. 

2) Apparently there's an "aCtiViTy" tab, for some reason (??) ... Go through each "aCtiViTy" and click to confirm that you have seen and received this information-less message. Done. Message received. 

3) Minimize Teams, go on about your day working on other things.

4) Teams just can't help itself, it has to POP ITSELF UP, back onto your monitor, where you told it NOT to be. It simply MUST cover up your other applications, for no reason. There are no new messages or activity. Everything is (still) read. I think it does this on a timer. After X number of minutes of you "ignoring" it, it gets its feelings hurt. Like a cat walking on your keyboard, it insists, "LOOK AT ME! Look at me RIGHT NOW!"

How the ƒuck is this "productivity" software?

It might have been the "Calls" tab. 

Under "Chat" there's a 'Mark all as read' that has a drop-down,
1) All 2) All chats 3) All channels
..when you select "All" this is THE ONLY WAY to mark "Calls" as read.

You can't do it from Calls, only from Chat.

This made the red dot on "Calls" go away.

Flint wrote:

Update: while looking at Startup Apps, I saw, "Calendar" and it was not selected. Could it be, MS has added a ƒucking CALENDAR back into the OS?

NOPE. It was a Calendar "App" that's just my Outlook Calendar in a little window. 

..with a little adjusting, you can convince it to "expand month view" to see a C A L E N D A R

So I'll just always have this app running, I'll just minimize it to the task bar, right? WRONG.
There's no Minimize button. You can only CLOSE it.

But wait! CLOSING it MINIMIZES IT. You actually CAN'T close it.
Also, you can't re-size it. Awesome.

This is really good. This is well done. 10/10 no notes
 

I appreciate your empathy, desk job brother

I solved my Teams issues.  I retired Feb 4th.  Don't plan to use it again.  Whee!

Incidentally, how to decrease the sensitivity of "drag and drop" to stop Windows from creating copies of everything you're Ctrl+clicking when you accidentally "drag" them by 1 millimeter:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
Increase DragHeight and Drag Width. I'm trying a value of 50 but won't know the results until after I reboot.

Didn't do sh!t. If I have files Ctrl+click selected, and move the mouse one pixel, the cursor instantly changes to "Copy to Desktop"
 

Thank you! This is very helpful.

I WAS TODAY YEARS OLD WHEN I FIGURED THIS OUT..

Say you have an Excel file where not every column has a value in it, because the source data was a delimited text file (like a csv) with some blank fields, and you've done 'Text to Columns' to get the data into discrete fields. You end up with this kind of arrangement--



Here's what you can do. 
1) select all the columns with blanks
2) F5, click 'Special', select 'Blanks'
3) Ctrl+Minus opens the Delete menu <<< (THE RIGHT-CLICK MENU MAKES IT LOOK LIKE THIS ISN'T POSSIBLE)
4) Select 'Shift cells up" and you get this:



I'm probably going to use this a million times in the next 12 months.

Happy Monkey wrote:

Coulda used that yesterday...  But my blanks weren't staggered and I didn't care about order, so I just used sort.

I'm always looking at HL7 records, which are basically a formatted, delimited text file. They have a lot of segments like this: "OBX|28|TX|||IMPRESSION: |||||||||20260610010033677" which, when the pipe-delimited values are separated into columns, produces a spreadsheet that looks like swiss cheese.

And I don't want to "treat consecutive delimiters as one" because one of the things I want the spreadsheet to do is "count" the columns, including blanks.