Thursday, April 22, 2010

Part 37: Can Outlook signatures be any harder to find?

So work decided that we should all have standardized signatures and can we all change them. Fine, whatever, I should be able to find out where to change signatures, right? They're a pretty generic part of email, so it's not like Outlook will hide the signature in an incoherent menu which is impossible to find. In a just and loving world, it would be on a main menu. Now, of course, Windows won't show me the whole menu if I haven't used it recently (thanks), but even if I have to expand the menus, I bet I can find it, right?

Wrong.

Now, in Gmail, where I don't even use a signature, I can find the signature setting easily. I click on settings, then, oh, hey, look! It's right there! Right on the main front screen! One click! Easy.

In Outlook? Oh, boy. I had to look it up on the Interwebs. First, I go to the tools menu. There, I select options. Now, leaving beside the fact that options shouldn't be under a tools menu (since an option isn't a tool) or should be called something out, I am presented with a mess of tabs and interfaces. I got to this without the web. But I didn't see "signature" on any of the tabs, so I kept going.

Had I clicked through all the tabs, I would have found that the mail format tab contains the signature dialogue. I have no idea what all the other functions Outlook has which are so very important, but the signature dialogue is in an not-at-all-obvious place, and is much further down the information tree than it should be. Then again, other than save and print, is there anything you can do without three menus and a dialogue box in Windows?

No comments: