All photos and documents submitted recently are now uploaded (unless I've accidentally missed something).

Microsoft have really ballsed up Outlook's GUI with their most recent update and this has made it more difficult to keep track of e-mail. I have four accounts and for the last few versions it is not possible to have them all with only one inbox and one sent box without faffing around with the settings and rules.

Hint to Microsoft: This is BAD, not good. Change Outlook back to the nice, easy and simple e-mail programme that it used to be and stop changing the interface. Better still, re-employ Bill Gates as your CEO. He knew more about what people wanted in a computer than the people who run the joint these days.

Microsoft have really ballsed up Outlook's GUI with their most recent update

You can say that again! I was using a colleague's Outlook account today to deal with some correspondence he asked me to assist with and I tested out some new swear words on it. I avoid using Outlook email myself. It means that my mail messages are not integrated but I can happily live with that.

Hint to Microsoft: This is BAD, not good. Change Outlook back to the nice, easy and simple e-mail programme that it used to be

Microsoft makes changes for the sake of change. Has for years, even when Gates was in charge. It has hundreds, if not thousands of programmers, sitting around with nothing better to do than continually re-invent the wheel. Essentially, they are redundant people making work for themselves.

My biggest problem is that because I don't like big changes, I tend not to experiment with alternatives. I still do a lot of things with Windows the way it was done in very early 16 bit versions.

The people they have now - in charge of the world's biggest software company - need to understand the difference between changes and improvements. There's a big difference between the meanings of these two words. There is a lot that is good about the Office product as a whole but the never-ending changes isn't one of them. Before someone can get used to a change the buggers go ahead and change it again.

The biggest annoyance for me was that the recent update changed the font sizes for the main window with the list of e-mails back to the default size, which I cannot see very well. It's then a pain to work out how to change the size back.

need to understand the difference between changes and improvements

Need to understand their mindset: In that culture, all functionality changes are -- by their definition -- 'improvements'. They happily ship Windows with thousands of known bugs (aka undocumented features) simply to meet the release cycle and thus have something for marketing to flog.

The "feature" that drove me nuts most of all was the bloody stupid "ribbon". I hate it with a passion.

And the fact that they have never managed to get the Remote Desktop Service working on Windows 10 Professional makes their other antics even more annoying. I upgraded from Windows 10 Home to Professional solely for Remote Desktop and it didn't work and when I complained they simply said there's no timetable for making it work.

As for the ribbon (not sure why they call it that, but anyway), Microsoft used to pay a lot of attention to ergonomics but they don't now, or at least, they are missing what is important to people. When they change the look and feel of the GUI this is usually coupled with rearranging where everything is and there's just no need for it.

Additionally, when searching for help on things, the worst possible website one can consult is Microsoft's. Nothing is ever explained in plain English and articles are usually full of tech jargon which no-one gives a toss about and which a lot of people simply don't understand. Third party sites with simple tutorials are often far more helpful and they lack the insane "was this page helpful today?" question down the bottom.

Brad, I once used MS Office extensively for creating manuals, lots of diagrams etc.

Then MS broke the draw functions with an "upgrade".

I switched over to Open Office. I invested a little bit of familiarisation time, but I've never looked back. Free, and no yearly ripoff fees! No paying for optional maths packs for Excel either. OO Writer is much better at opening earlier Word documents than Word is.

And the OO Draw package is SO much better than Visio. Now I see why MS broke the inbuilt draw functions.

I HATE being ripped off! I think Open Office disproves Gupta's law!

Gupta is useless in his current role. He is the man who killed the Windows phone and it was through ineptitude and failure to capture a market which Microsoft ultimately once had a 100% market share in. Their approach is to dress Android phones up with Office, Edge and the Windows desktop but that will never be a Windows phone, which is an immensely capable environment but because Microsoft failed in marketing - a part of business that originally made them successful at everything they did, the Windows phone just died in the backside. They did everything wrong with it and just handed the market to Samsung and Google on a silver plate.

That's a bit like that "auto-moronic" telephone answering service Telstra has. Nothing I have ever dealt with screams louder than that at saying, go elsewhere. But of course they have no idea as to why they are loosing customers.

The "Welcome to Telstra" yarn?

.........We are here to help you get more frustrated:

What they have written on some of their vans is equally funny - "Help has arrived".

I'll give this to TPG: they never pretend to help.

That comment has brightened up my morning.

Hi,

I've noticed over the past few weeks during my travels on the web that search engine links to here are broken because of the default.asp being renamed to home.asp. Usually when I come here it's because I've come across a search result when researching something.

I'm an ex-web developer so it's not a big deal to me at all to figure out how to get to the right page when I click a broken link from a search engine, but until today I thought the site was either closed down or down completely because I got a 404 for every search result, and I never thought to try going directly to the home page until today.

It might seem like a trivial little thing, but a lot of people may end up thinking the site is no longer working, or go away entirely out of frustration.

Is it possible to set up a rewrite rule to make default.asp go to home.asp so that old links to here continue to work? I'm not very familiar with IIS (I used to work with *nix/apache systems) but it should be pretty simple to solve, if not, there would likely be other workarounds.

If you need help with anything like this I don't mind helping out.

Hi Brad, yes external hosting does make life smooth, site is fast loading and does not drop out.
Good work.
The only oddity is when I use "outlook" as a browser: on reviewing some of my older articles, the imbedded jpgs do not show in the page, just a white area.
If I swap to chrome, no problem.
I wish MS would just leave outlook alone, agree with your comments elsewhere, its not "improved" just harder to use.
Was a simple menu-icon app, now its got dumbs things all over it.

Thank you again for persisting with the site, its a joy.
Fred.