My Microsoft Office 365 woes: Constant crashes, malware macros – and settings from Hell

My settings matter

I have no idea what Microsoft's target audience with their default settings is, but I don't think "people" is part of it. Thus, for me, making Office usable requires changing a lot of settings, some of which are discussed above.

Perhaps the most important of these are the "disable all the rich macro functionality and don't try to do things involving images or scripts in emails" settings. They have security implications so I fret over them.

When I removed Office 2010 to install Office 365's Office 2013 version, it removed my settings. When I went into "programs and features," found "Microsoft Office 356 Business," hit "change" and ran either "quick repair" or "online repair," it removed my settings.

When I "upgraded" – and boy has that become a euphemism these days – to Office 365's Office 2016, it removed my settings. At least one update pass has also removed my settings. Office – or at least Office 365 – really, really doesn't want to preserve my settings.

Maybe that wouldn't be such a burden, but it takes 15 minutes to set everything up when I remember where all the buttons are ... and Microsoft keeps moving the relevant buttons.

Trapped

LibreOffice isn't quite as fast as Word, but it's getting there. What is yet to be determined is not only whether or not I can defang all the "smart quote"-like stupidity and either have it preserve my settings through upgrades or make the settings changes something easy that can be injected at boot.

None of this addresses Outlook, the anchor that weighs me down to Microsoft's increasingly labyrinthine and counterproductive ecosystem. I keep rotary shopping the alternatives, but nothing is good enough.

Google's mail client can only be described as the result of colliding MC Escher with Dr Seuss while simultaneously tearing a hole into multiple alternate space-times, allowing for an unpredictable and constantly shifting non-Euclidean design philosophy.

Pretty much everything else either doesn't talk to Exchange worth a damn, requires you to first invent the universe if you want things like calendaring, or is actually worse at IMAP than Outlook. Something that – let's face it – shouldn't actually be possible.

And there we rest. Still. It's been at least 16 years since it became perfectly obvious to the entire world that Outlook was the lynchpin to Microsoft's empire and a functional clone still doesn't exist. Given the rate at which the usability of Outlook is deteriorating with each new version, this might not matter in the long run, but it would cheer me up some if our "productivity" tools made life easier instead of being a depressing race to some sort of nightmarish bottom.

Until then, we will all charge forward using the operating system and productivity suite that we hope will do the least amount of damage. ®