Posey's Tips & Tricks
Where Microsoft's 'New Outlook' Doesn't Quite Deliver
It might sound like not a big deal, but it is incredibly annoying.
I recently wrote a post in which I talked about a couple of features that I really love in the new version of Outlook. Recently however, I have spent quite a bit of time working with the new Outlook. While there are definitely some things that I like about the new version, I have found that there are also some things that I really, really do not like. As such, I thought it only fair that I write a blog post outlining the things that I really hope that Microsoft will change before forcing everyone to adopt the new Outlook.
By far, my single biggest gripe about the new Outlook is that single clicking on a message causes the message to open. Ever since Outlook was first released in the '90s, opening a message required a double click. Single clicking on a message simply selects the message without opening it.
I will be the first to admit that single click vs. double click probably sounds really nit picky. If you really stop and think about it though, it means that you can't click on a message without opening it in the process. Like you, I receive plenty of messages that I would rather not open (spam, phishing messages, etc.).
In all fairness, Microsoft has made it possible to delete a message without opening it. You can hover over the message and then click on the Delete icon that appears just to the right of the message.
It's also possible to click on a message that you have already read (which of course, opens the message), press the Esc key to close the message and then use the keyboard to scroll through the various messages within your Inbox.
To put it another way, there are workarounds to the single click / double click madness. However, when you have spent decades single clicking on a message to select it, only to abruptly transition to a model in which a single click opens the message, some messages are bound to get opened by mistake.
I was curious as to how other people felt about a single click opening a message and what Microsoft had to say about it. While researching the issue, I found several message boards on which people were expressing their discontentment with the single click. I also found a post from someone at Microsoft who said, "Regarding your concern, this behavior is actually a feature of the 'New Outlook' and cannot be disabled. However, you can still select messages without opening them by using the Ctrl key + left-click on the message."
I also found a message board within the Microsoft Feedback Portal in which you can vote for Microsoft to bring back Outlook's original single click / double click functionality.
Another major annoyance with the new Outlook is that if you do accidentally single click on a message, causing the message to open, the message is instantly flagged as having been read. Of course, this is the same way that Outlook has always worked. If you open a message, the message is treated as though it has been read. The problem with the new Outlook is that because it is so easy to accidentally open a message with a single click that messages may be marked as read simply because of an errant mouse click. I have actually taken the step of configuring Outlook so that I have to manually indicate that a message has been read, just to avoid accidentally missing important messages.
Besides the single and double click issues, there is one more thing that really annoys me about the new Outlook – and this is the big one. Normally, when someone sends you an email with an attachment, you can drag and drop the attachment to a location on your PC or on a network drive. With the new Outlook however, you can't do that. Instead, if you want access to an attachment, you have to either download the attachment or save it to OneDrive. You can still preview the attachment within Outlook without having to download the files, but you can no longer drag and drop an attachment from an email message to a folder on your computer. You can see an example of this in the figure below.
[Click on image for larger view.] Figure 1. You now have to download attachments before you can save them to your PC.
About the Author
Brien Posey is a 22-time Microsoft MVP with decades of IT experience. As a freelance writer, Posey has written thousands of articles and contributed to several dozen books on a wide variety of IT topics. Prior to going freelance, Posey was a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and health care facilities. He has also served as a network administrator for some of the country's largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox. In addition to his continued work in IT, Posey has spent the last several years actively training as a commercial scientist-astronaut candidate in preparation to fly on a mission to study polar mesospheric clouds from space. You can follow his spaceflight training on his Web site.