I’m a lot like you. For the most part, I try to look beyond the question being asked, and find the root cause. If the root cause is because of a skill issue, I’ll direct them to the next logical resource. If it’s not a skill issue, or I can’t determine that it’s a skill issue, then I’ll continue to test until I can make that determination.
9 times out of 10, if I find a solution to make a thing work in a program, I’ll share that with them, and let them take it from there.
A lot of the people I support are working in the finance space and my company has an entire support department for finance applications. I’ll either bounce the problem off of them, or just direct them to the finance support team for guidance.
This wasn’t either of those things. It wasn’t even asking how. It was straight up telling me to do a thing for them, in a program they should know how to use. It’s not a complex finance program or anything, it’s literally Outlook.
Yeah, Outlook has a lot of little things that throw people. Just getting people to find the view settings they want is tough sometimes, and font size in outlook doesn’t change with the character size of the OS being changed. Automatically disabling com add-ons that are supposed to not disable by group policy do to “slow start times” of outlook. Online calendars are a mess, sync issues, filter issues, spam issues, the spam blockers within the admin console of o365. Convincing people to get rid of .pst files. .pst files not being compatible with onedrive, importing .pst files to their online archive (which is really just a second email storage on the back end). Takes forever, then half don’t import properly, then you get them to re-run it and maybe it works but you have duplicates. Deleted emails that need recovery a month after they realized they needed it.
Sometimes it makes me realize why companies push users to just use the Webapp, but there’s always something.
Didn’t even touch the distros or shared emails/calendars yet lol
Outlook is a long list unto itself of random crap that’s probably going to go wrong.
To be fair, it’s not like word or Excel are any less complex, but people tend to know those apps way better for some reason.
The Web version is taking over. Just like they did with teams, they’re starting a webview version of Outlook. They’re very creative this time, calling it “new Outlook” 🤦♂️
It’s all very dumb.
I completely agree on the view settings too. It’s like a world unto itself just to sort and organize a single view of Outlook. I helped one user the other day, who simply wanted to see everything as conversations. It’s an easy fix, and it wasn’t the reason they logged a ticket, but it took about 8 seconds and I was already connected to their system.
Do office workers not have a requirement to learn basic MS office skills anymore?
In my experience it’s often simply expected by companys that the worker just knows this stuff because many GenX/Millenials just know their ways around that, but GenZ/Alpha are in general more knowledgeable about the functions of their smartphones than any desktop applications. It will take some time until HR departments start screening their applicants for stuff like Office knowledge (again - they used to 2 generations ago)
I hate that the Outlook Android app has ads that appear like unread emails, and as far as I know you can’t remove them (at least if you’re using a company-provided email).
Is that the Outlook coming from the Intune company portal app, or a personal install from the playstore and just adding an email they let you add? Sounds terrible. Most of the work I was doing as to had it all running through Intune, so I didn’t ever see that stuff. I could see how that would turn off most users. On our end just about every time security updates came out it would lock out the ability to access teams, outlook or anything until the updates were performed, and you logged back into the comp portal app to ensure the device was secure against whatever new threat there might be. So you’d have to set up confirm with 2 factors to get signed back in every couple months and require at least a pin to get into your emails.
