Comments on: Outlook menus and NewsGator

By: Greg Reinacker

Greg Reinacker — Sat, 24 Jan 2004 19:01:55 +0000

You can just right-click on the Outlook toolbar, and turn off the NewsGator toolbar, if you don’t want it there…

By: Shawn A. Van Ness

Shawn A. Van Ness — Sat, 24 Jan 2004 07:06:23 +0000

Please, please give us a toolbar-free UI option. The mouse is a terrible HID for frequently accessed features — it’s always been about UI discoverability, not UI usability — news aggregators are the killer app for the keyboard!

As a user, once you reach that level of enlightenment, the very next thing you want to do is turn off all toolbars — LCD pixels are the most expensive component of a modern PC, and that lone little newsgator toolbar is wasting thousands of them. I want it to go away, so I can have those pixels back.

By: Greg Reinacker

Greg Reinacker — Sun, 23 Mar 2003 18:38:07 +0000

This has been interesting…I’ve gotten a lot of responses in email, and some more here, and it seems folks are about 60% in favor of the current menu, and 40% in favor of moving it to a toolbar.

FYI, for 1.1 (should be released in a week or so), the menu will stay in its current position; however, we’re keeping this item open, and we may change it for a later version.

By: Anil

Anil — Sun, 23 Mar 2003 11:35:58 +0000

Strongly in favor of moving it to a button on the toolbar. Be a good neighbor.

By: Simon Ratner

Simon Ratner — Tue, 18 Mar 2003 11:11:55 +0000

Mark: That only works until you restart Outlook. My guess is that add-in rebuilds the menu on startup, discarding any customisations.

By: Greg Robinson

Greg Robinson — Mon, 17 Mar 2003 18:27:30 +0000

I prefer the menu as it is now. I really do not see my Outlook menu growing.

By: Mark Gardner

Mark Gardner — Mon, 17 Mar 2003 15:51:28 +0000

If your menu bar gets cluttered can’t you just go into the “Customize” dialog and drag one of the offending add-on menus to another toolbar?

By: Matthew Langham's Radio Weblog: Montag, 17. März 2003

Matthew Langham's Radio Weblog: Montag, 17. März 2003 — Mon, 17 Mar 2003 14:57:03 +0000

Pingback

By: Jorge Curioso

Jorge Curioso — Mon, 17 Mar 2003 07:26:56 +0000

Penultimate sentence above should read “Menu items are *always* accessible via the _alt_ and arrrow keys”.

Hey, Greg, can you get this comment thingamajiggie to support line breaks? :-)

By: Jorge Curioso

Jorge Curioso — Mon, 17 Mar 2003 07:24:38 +0000

I like Kevin’s suggestion. It’s too bad there’s not an “Add-Ins” submenu in Outlook like there is in Access.

< < One problem with putting it on the menus, whether a main menu or a sub menu, is there's no way to reserve an accelerator key. >>

Actually, I believe the opposite to be true. Having it on a submenu *decreases* the likelihood that there will be a conflict, because the scope is reduced to just that menu/submenu.

It is toolbar keyboard access that is more problematic. There, the hotkey *is* global, unlike for submenus, so the probability of conflict is higher than on a submenu. Unlike most Windows apps, there is a (non-hotkey) way to access the Outlook toolbar via the keyboard, but I bet that the percentage of people who know it is infintessimal. :-)

< < it may or may not be possible to use the keyboard to access it even if it is on the menus. >>

This is not true. Menu items are *always* accessible via the and arrrow keys, even in the absence of hotkeys. Most if not all keyboard access folks are familiar with this.