It’s worthwhile knowing that the calendar is just a view of a folder in an Exchange mailbox, and accepting just moves the item into the calendar folder.
As a former IT worker, i assure you that if its not on the chronological place of the inbox where it “always is”, it doesnt exist. Its bad user experience. Copy or link the details to the calendar instead, keep the message unless deleted manually.
I was going to say that. Not that I’m not above hating on the outlook, but the meeting details go into the calendar…
As someone who has been in IT support for twenty years. The fact that people aren’t slaughtering Microsoft executives for how terrible a product excel is… it’s wild to me.
Every accountant uses excel and every single one of them have called us in IT support to demand we restore 2-18 hours of work only to find out we can’t restore it because Microsoft excel (and MS word) are two of the single most broken terrible pieces of shit software.
I’m basically a person who has to tell people the hours of work they did is lost because Microsoft are incompetent
I’m tired boss…
Apple lovers, your crap is lost because Apple are so locked down… Well you think it’s locked down, Apple products are actually easier to crack it just takes 5 minutes more.
Yeah, Excel has its issues, but if someone works on a document for 18 hours without hitting the save button, that’s on them. I have Excel defaulting to have auto-save turned on and it has greatly reduced the amount of times I have to tell people their data is gone. Of course, there are people who turn it off because they don’t like it. But they know that if Excel crashes on them and they lose their work, I can’t do anything about it.
Microsoft software has big compatibility issuess on Windows.
The amount of interns/students commenting “its fine/skill issue”, shows the demographic of lemmy and how comfortable people are giving stupid opinions about problems they don’t have, but are apparently experts on.
To all of you: having the email both in inbox and calendar gives another sorting of the information, which is always a good thing. Some people might prefer removing the emails to “tidy up” inbox, but that shouldn’t make it the only option (because those people, other than OCD, probably don’t have more than 10 emails / day, with > 50 they would have give up on tidy)
Don’t forget how Outlook is often “cloud” now with local message backing sometimes failing to load a message until you choose another a few times, or how Teams overlaps Outlook overlaps Teams for functionality in a terrible useless way.
Or how selecting a message thread often doesn’t show the most recent or any of the unread messages, while clicking the unread message directly also sometimes doesn’t load it.
Microsoft business tools are an absolute joke.
The most frustrating for me is Outlook’s search functionality. I sent out purchase order emails with the PO# in the email. If I search for a number looking for my PO, I want THAT number, not a completely different number. Don’t give me the wrong number as a FIRST FUCKING RESULT!
It’s not the only option, I have it disabled so they stay in my inbox once accepted/declined.
You work somewhere where the IT policy allows you to change the setting. Lucky
Damn, they lock down your Outlook settings? I don’t think I’ve ever worked anywhere that did that.
My company locks it down and deletes email older than 3 months but default unless you request a special group asking for longer storage.
Ah yes, the “it’s not evidence tampering if we just delete the stuff as a matter of course” policy.
if the IT policy disallows changing settings then the company wants you to fail
Welcome to the fortune 500.
My org auto deletes emails over 3 months old and I’m pretty sure it’s to CYA.
Actual Outlook problem, though: if you paste an image into the email, it doesn’t always attach when I hit send, because it’s linking to a local image on my machine. The recipients see a broken image placeholder. Who came up with that system? This is through the app on Mac.
that moment when your boss rescheduled the meeting 10 times in a week.
I swear to god it felt like i was in Inception. The meeeting email looked so familiar and i remembered “accepted” it. Accepted and poof its gone
… It goes into your calendar?
Then you find yourself remembering that you accepted what feels like it was an important meeting yesterday, but want to remember when and have a hard time finding it because you can’t quite recall enough searchable detail, but you know it came up yesterday.
This is why it doesn’t bother me. Once I’ve put it on my calendar, then I personally free up my own memory and forget it until the reminder.
Also, if you are this brain-dead you can disable delete after accept, in settings
Yeah, plenty of things to hate on Outlook.
But this aint it.
True but if its not in the next few weeks its a pain to track down
And then you have to open calendar, find it among all te rest with whatever name, find the email l button in the expansed view and reply there if anything changes. It sucks.
Yes because they want to remove the memories of all the trauma once you’ve made peace with it.
And that’s how I ended up moving from software that “knew better than me” and chose for me.
I know exactly what you mean! I used to call it “computer knows best”.
At home I avoid all MS products because CKB drives me nuts. At work, they tell me what software to use. :(
all software does stuff for you, that’s almost the definition
Linux: “sure thing, boss! I’ll delete the bootloader right away!”
Depends on the definition of “doing stuff for me”.
I can practically guarantee you never want to use an application which has no conditions or branching in it whatsoever
That is implied when talking about an application.
Ok, so we agree, it is implied that using an application means it chooses things for you, contrary to the statement of the above poster’s desires. I’m being extremely pedantic of course, but the point is it’s not actually easy to determine which things software should decide automatically and which things it shouldn’t for optimal UX, it’s different for every user, and just making everything configurable isn’t a sufficient answer because complicated configuration is itself bad UX.
complicated configuration is itself bad UX.
So have defaults that work to do what it says in the tin and have settings to change whatever the user wants. Can even have an advanced toggle or something if you want to have simplified settings for people that don’t care as much. These are solved problems. Removing settings to have a simple UX is just devs being lazy.
I’m not arguing that outlook is handling this in the right way, it’s clearly stupid, but this is definitely not a “solved problem”
I prefer that thing where someone sends you an invite for a month from now, and sends you a separate email with the important documents in it. At least the stuff in the calendar invite can be found from the calendar, that email you sent a month ago is not tied to the meeting in any way.
When I get the invite: “I don’t need to read those documents, the meeting is in a month.”
At the time of the meeting: “Wow they’re really unprepared, they should’ve attached documents for this meeting.”
Don’t forget the correlary. Cancelled meetings remain on your calendar and still trigger reminders and alerts until you manually delete it.
There’s also the problem where someone sends a reoccurring meeting, then leaves the company. The meeting can’t be removed. Ever.
Oh man, I’d love to do something like this before being shit-canned. Just a little parting gift to remember me by.
They did implement a fix for this, you have to have not deleted their mailbox, and use a powershell command, and you might need some hidden id if you don’t want to delete all of them.
Im sure it’ll only take 6 years for them to add a button in the admin centre, right?
I wish they would implement the final fix and purge all microslop products fron the workplace. I’m canadian and we’re supposed to not buy american unless we have no alternative…
Thank god europe is working on FOSS alternatives and open standards… it might just save us.
“The day Microsoft makes a product that doesnt suck is when they start selling vacuums.”
Sadly the UK is welded at the hip to Microslop, and America in general for that matter.
I wish there was a way to decline only future occurrences, though. I don’t want to remove the previous meetings.
There used to be, I’m not kidding. I remember it still being around win 8. You could choose to respond to the specific meeting, the whole series, or only future occurences.
It was very useful, so of course Microsoft removed it
Decline series. It removes it from your calendar.
Oh and if you do that there is no way to accept that again because it just disappears. You either have to find the original email or ask the person to invite you again.
…The person that left the company and won’t be running that meeting anymore?
Don’t you worry Microslop will get right on it and fix this by giving copilot full unfettered access to your emails.
For anyone genuinely struggling with this: There’s a setting in the Outlook options that will keep the invite in your inbox after you accept it.
I don’t have access to Outlook anymore so I can’t tell you where it is, sorry. It’s buried in that awful overwhelming interface somewhere, but hopefully knowing that it exists is a helpful starting point. Good luck.
Edit: Apparently they’ve removed this option in the “new” Outlook, my condolences if you’re using that one.
My work IT policy would not let me change that setting, infuriatingly. They said it was a money saving initiative to keep our inboxes small. This is necessary because we use MS Cloud services, which charges by the electron or something.
Outlook also embeds the contents of the email into the calendar event. All of that information is preserved and can be accessed by double-clicking on the event in the calendar.
Clearly most of the people in this thread don’t want to scroll forward in a calendar to find what was easily accessible a moment ago. It should exist in the calendar and in the inbox. It’s an arbitrary quality of life issue, and they removed the ability for the users to decide for themselves if they can retain the message in their inbox.
The invite will still be in the delete folder unless they rage closed the program for no reason in between accepting and wanting to know more.
Where is the event? There are hundreds of them and I have to find one I dont have the details for
Pretty awkward when you forget/can’t find the event date though. I’ve managed to create an event in the wrong year at least once.
Yea, I discovered this by … opening the event in Calendar
microsoft is a cancer
Doesn’t all that go to your calendar?
Yes but God forbid you forget when that meeting is or misremember any detail… good luck finding it in the calendar amongst the rest
So why don’t you disable the option to delete after accepting?
What option?
You could, you know, check your calendar? Set reminders? Do anything at all that implies a minimum of competence?
Or, you know, the email could just not delete.
No, let’s continue to be a Microslop apologist. /s
That’s a setting.
Not anymore. It’s been deprecated, as insane as that sounds.
They’re “streamlining the user experience” by taking away all those confusing options and settings!
Eww… Fuckin Microsoft strikes again
Do you really have troubles with finding stuff in your calendar?
Imagine someone sends you an invite to a meeting a couple of weeks or months out. You accept. The next day you need to check something that was in that meeting invite. Fuck, was that meeting set in march or april? And what was it called? There are like three plausible names for it… Woldn’t it be nice to just scroll down to yesterdays emails and have it there?
Either treat invites as a message, or do some completely separate calendar-notification system. But the inbetween is kinda the worst of both worlds.
I just look in Deleted Items
I have hundreds if not thousands deleted emails per week. Searching the deleted folder is a pain.
Im glad this topic got brought up because I thought I was the only one having this issue.
Thank goodness I only have to attend about 10 meetings a month.
In a corporate role you can have hundreds of meetings a month. Yeah, they can get lost.
Especially when protocol is to add every meeting you receive to the calendar. It’s easy to miss stuff when you’ve got 8 triple booked meetings in a day and you only actually NEED to attend 1 in every 5 or so meetings.
Basically nobody has good hygiene when it comes to meetings, emails, or messages anymore “fuck it, I will send it to the whole team” - dumb assholes trying to look busy.
You have a good point that there needs to be a way to set priorities. For people with many meetings, responding as accept, reject, or tentative is not enough choices
One of the worst things about corporate roles is spending so long in meetings you cant actually action anything that comes up in the meetings.
Check out this guy that has two meetings a week. And none of them have similar titles, attendees or anything.
Then they would be similar in mail form, wouldn’t they?
no, they could have been received different days, that is why losing them from inbox is a pain. It doesn’t happen when you are a junior/intern/small company, but in big companies you end up receiving a ton of invites, being able to easily access the one you accepted today, two hours ago or two days ago by reception date rather than meeting date is a huge help. You basically have an additional sorting of those invite emails.
to the point where I just don’t accept any to keep them in the inbox.
The fact that your particular use case doesn’t need this, doesn’t mean everyone else is doing it wrong. jeezz, the audacity of people… you must work for Microslop, they think exactly like you: “if I don’t need it, surely no one does, or they are doing something wrong”
Have you actually used the search in Outlook? The search seems non-deterministic and will happily deliver some results, but not necessarily all. And if you fire the same search again, it might even list a different number of results from before. It’s quite usable if there’s only a few results and all of them are quite recent/in the next days. But get a larger number of results and it will fall apart quickly
I tried to search for something in Outlook last week. A particular message from a retailer I’d bought something from.
A message from them was at the top of the inbox, having just been received, but I needed an earlier, the date of which was unknown. So I searched for the name of the retailer.
Despite there being an email RIGHT THERE, Outlook decided that no, I did not, in fact, have any messages at all from any sender of that name. Not in any of my inboxes. Nope.
Stupid shit. I hate it.
Stupid work PC.
As insane as my work calendar is, yes. I’ve accepted meetings and days later needed to go back to find the entry. Unless you memorize when they meeting was you’re going to have to find that manually. It’s a very avoidable inconvenience.
yes. I have meetings for around a dozen projects at any week in time, and some people really suck at titling meetings.
“issues touchpoint” OKAY BUT FOR WHICH ISSUES ON WHICH PROJECT, JESSICA
OKAY BUT FOR WHICH ISSUES ON WHICH PROJECT, JESSICA
the one about titling meetings in emails properly.
It is not unusual at all for me to get invites for meetings that will occur several quarters out. Also, quite a few of my invites contain agendas, “action items” and other bullshit that calls for thorough preparations that are impossible to finish 15 minutes in advance when the reminder comes on.
Don’t you check upcoming meetings? Such as at the beginning of the day?
Once accepted, why would you care when any specific meeting is, just which ones are coming soon?
Granted I track things requiring significant effort through other mechanisms, so my meeting prep is more typically checking statuses and collecting data/summaries
You are sadly wasting perfectly good words.
Most people still don’t even understand the difference between SharePoint and onedrive. You know, concepts that have existed for more than a decade? Outlook has been around longer and look how many people are clueless about how it works and incurious to ever find out.
These are the people that still put all their shit in spreadsheets that they email as attachments. You know, morons.
Or just look at the original email if it didn’t get deleted?
Yes why not just do more work to compensate for MS mediocrity?! what a great idea!!!
I hate Microsoft and everything they stand for. I only use Linux on my private devices. But this particular issue is just a dumb thing to complain about.
The fact that you reference Linux in a discussion about Outlook makes me think you don’t know what you are talking about.
Have a good life
I’ve been using both Unix/Linux and Windows with Outlook for longer than most people here have been around. So yeah, Totes McGoats, my friend.
Over 70 people here are idiots. It’s really not that big a fucking deal. Meeting invites sitting in inbox are just noise, and can get outdated. Worst case scenario it’s in the trash bin. If the trash bin is good enough for pulling frozen food boxes for instructions it’s good enough for this.
Not everyone’s work lives are completely owned and controlled by their outlook calendar. Therefore, not everyone regularly checks their calendar, let alone remembers stupid quirks.
Bingo. I work in hospice and spend most of my day driving around to people’s houses, but we do occasionally have meetings. Every Tuesday morning, every other Wednesday, and a monthly meeting where 2 dates and times are offered to allow for scheduling around them for patient care. Some are on Teams, some are in person. The meeting invites for this year we’re sent out in December last year. Good luck remembering. At least they’ll sent out reminders a day or two before the meetings so we can panic fix our schedules.
Good luck searching in any Microsoft product without knowing the exactly named item.
Alternative would be not deleting it so you can sort by person if you remember who invited you.
You do get a reminder 15 min before the meeting, where you cqn access the meeting and all the details.
I’ll just read and comment the 200 page document in preparation to the meeting in 15 minutes, then.
Only if the organizer set a reminder for 15 minutes. If they do not set a reminder, you do not get one. Yes, the organizer sets the reminder time. It’s stupid.
With regards to this meme: you can find the invite by checking your deleted items or just looking for it in your calendar.
Huh? You set your alert preferences, not the organizer.
That would be the expectation, yes. In my experience that is not (always) the case.
You can find several examples online of users complaining about this to Microsoft, going back to at least 2014.
No, it’s the reality. The organizer does not set reminders.
The organizer would have to deliberately disable the reminder…
The organizer doesn’t set reminders in the first place, except for their own alerts.
How else does one manage to skip out on a meeting that one really doesn’t want to hold?
“Sorry boss, I tried. Had to reschedule, cause half the meeting never showed.”
The only thing worse than organizing a meeting you don’t want to hold, is doing it twice
I have been in such meetings, where the organizer didn’t have a reminder set, and because of it several key people didn’t get a reminder and either missed the meeting or arrived late.
Since it’s working with open protocols, you can’t guarantee that. Someone could be using Thunderbird or some other client with a different setting.
True, but why would any email client just ignore that crucial peice of data from the most common email client?
Even if the devs dislike it, ignoring it would only make it seem as if your client is the one with the issues.
No, I mean from the other side. The meeting organizer could be using an email client that doesn’t set a reminder by default.
What if you reject but there was a link to something else. Or the list of future dates for a event but you can’t make it to the scheduleed one. Or change your mind and need the info but can’t find the email.
You can use the setting to add declined meetings to your calendar
Lifesaver feature. This should be the default in the apps. Everyone I’ve shown this to said they wish they knew this existed sooner. Freaking MS, I swear…
It does…
So then you have to scroll through your calendar for the information instead of a simple search
Calendar items show up in search… You’re grasping for a reason to be mad where there isn’t one.
Oh, an invite, sweet! RSVP real quick. Oh shit, when was it again? All good, I’ll search for the sender. 32,000 emails show up.
No, usually you would check over your appointments for the day, and if they required more information, you would pick up on that as you prepared for your schedule. Usually while having breakfast
As an engineer with 1-5 meetings in a day, that’s how I always did it
Look in your delete folder? Or do you have it erase everything immediately? Like, there’s a dozen ways for this to not be an issue, but you’ve decided shooting yourself in the foot is the way to go just so you have someone to whine about.
That actually might help, thanks!
You can also set it to not delete the emails.
The amount of people in this thread that have never had more than a couple meetings is shocking. Or meetings a few months out that get hidden by mundane things.
Having your chronologically ordered email tends to be easier to sort through than trying to remember the event name/date from a calendar invite.
Yeah my conclusion is that people just don’t know how to use calendars or threaded messages
Not a huge fan of the threaded messages. Sometimes they get scrambled or buried by someone else’s reply(s) so that it takes more effort to find the message I need.
Search function only works if you know what you’re searching for.
Like it initially, but I prefer chronological ungrouped email at this point.
The issue with conversation view for me is that other people don’t send you a new email for a new subject, they search for a 3 year old unrelated message, then hit reply on that.
or threaded messages
snort
If a thread I was on today is any indication, you look at the post on top, then sometimes the one at the bottom, and just for variety’s sake sometimes there’s a reply in the middle. All MS Outlook generated.
