Forum Discussion
Outlook - Spellcheck moved from right click to left click
In the last week, the spell check option in my Office 365 Outlook has changed from the right click to the left click. I am assuming this was some kind of update to Office. The change hasn't occurred in any of my desktop office programs.
The change is driving me insane; I keep clicking the wrong button and my work hence is taking longer. The is compounded by the fact I have to remember that other office programs still use right click so its doesn't matter which program I'm in now I click the wrong button first!! This may seen insignificant but it greatly affects the usability of the product.
Right click has always been for spell-checking; not just in Office programs but generally through most software. Please advise how I can return Office 365 outlook to right click for spelling. I have attached a screen print showing my current menu options for right vs left click.
Thank you for your help.
Holy cow yes!!
This is driving me mad. Microsoft, spell check has been in right-click context menu for DECADES, and not just in word but EVERYWHERE.
There is NO REASON to move the spell check menu to left click, in fact, there are many reasons against it!
- It has been in the right click menu with no issues for decades- What if I want to place my cursor inside the word to edit it without a menu coming up
- There is no common software that I am aware of that brings up a context menu with a left click
- All your current desktop and online applications have spell check in the right click menu, meaning word online experience is FRACTURED. As I'm typing this I am correcting spelling with right click. When I move to a different program it will be right click, when I go to word on desktop it will be right click.
- This change isn't intuitive, it doesn't improve anything, it doesn't solve an existing problem, it doesn't make the users life easier, it doesn't make the IT managers life better, it causes headache, confusion, frustration, and an overall distaste for your products.
This is not some woke change like Apple removing the headphone jack. This is not for the betterment of future iterations of Word. This is not even change for the sake of change, it LITERALLY WOULD HAVE COST YOU NOTHING TO NOT CHANGE THIS. In fact, it probably cost you thousands to change this because now you have to moderate all the complaints from your users, pay someone to make the change for no reason, pay someone to QA the change (although no one probably did because WTF would they say, "yeah I think this is a great change." without using it to try and type a document for longer than 10 seconds without loosing their mind because of the missing context menu and the little popup in their face every time), you have to pay to host the content of all the complaints, and I can almost guarantee (unless you foolishly double-down on this hideous oversigt/idiotic design decision) that you will be paying someone to change it back to the way it was.
Fire the designer that came up with this change. Fire the Project Manager who decided it was even remotely a good idea to toy with the idea and throw it up on the project board, fire the QA team who didn't stand up for their honor and tell you this was an awful change, and fire the dev that pushed this garbage to production. Swallow your pride, this was a bad change, we all make mistakes.
As the old proverb goes, "no need to reinvent the wheel and turn it into a cube."This is driving me crazy too.
I write mails in 3 different languages, and it was so easy to right click, select my language and then correct things. Especially when i write mails that has more than just one language in the same email.
This new left click system is utterly... sorry for the bad language... moronic.
It makes no sense at all, plus every time i want to edit a word by clicking on it with left click, well what do you know the "correction" menu opens and hides all the other words around. The hiding other words is actually not the problem. The fact that a menu opens when i didn't ask for it is what is annoying me!
Now i'm wasting time writing my mails in a text document, correcting them with the NORMAL right click like it has been for the past 10 year at least, and then copy pasting it into my email to then send it.
And then i waste time trying to figure out how to disable it, get annoyed because of course settings are hidden behind 3 different menus, can't fix it. So i google it to then figure out that i can either disable it completely and have no correction AT ALL, or have the illogical lame one that you guys have made with left click.
But hey, here on this site i can right click on words, select my language and correct them accordingly.
Why change it in one place of your site but not the other?
The more and more i use outlook, the more and more i start to think that you guys actually have nothing to do. Nothing to fix, no new good ideas that improve usability (probably because it was perfectly fine as it was before) so you just start making up things to make and change for no reason other than having something to do and therefore keeping your job.
You make a broken feature, now you have to fix it. Work. Keep your paycheck.
You don't make broken features, nothing to fix. No work. Find a new job.
Whoever is working for you guys and getting a big paycheck for these types of ideas should be fired because they clearly have no idea what they are doing (other than making bad decisions and keep their job to find new ideas to fix their bad decision, with new bad decisions). Hire me, i'll do it for free. Actually it's pretty simple, outlook, roll back to how you were 5 years ago. All the new fancy features that are useless and broken and just in the way, weren't there back then.
And great. Now i just spent 10 mins writing this. Such a waste of time, so frustrating, so **bleep** illogical! Stop it damnit!
Edit: Funny, i can write damnit, but if you remove the it at the end, the word gets "bleeped" out. Hahaha. 10/10 microsoft.
Well, this was interesting.
For a few days i was able to use my "right click" menu on words and change the language etc... But now, i can't. Only the left click menu that opens (annoyingly when i just want to click on a work to delete or add one letter "helo" to "hello" take less time to click and add an L rather than having this menu).
I hope i figure out how to get the right click menu working again and i will share it. And hope that they don't fix the "bug" that allows us to not use their broken menu... lol.
Edit: i actually have a blank "rich text document" on my desktop where i write my emails, correct them, and copy paste them into outlook and then send them, due to this annoying useless menu. True story.
Megan4123 I totally agree. As Peter Griffin (aka Family Guy dad) would say, that's what really grinds my gears.
Come on Microsoft, why would you buck the trend of a Global user interaction pattern. Really?
Given that Brian and Stewie from Microsoft helped you launch Office 2013, maybe you should be getting advice from them as opposed to your own designers?
Microsoft please change this stupid " upgrade" back. It's taking productivity away. Did a 10 year old who just started using computers come up with this?
I had the same problem which was quite annoying enough but I was slowly getting used to it. Now I can't right or left click to get corrections. I get the squiggly red line, if I right click I get an option to use an Emoji?? and if I left click the red line disappears and the spell checker somehow switches off for that email completely and can't be switched back on.
I have already sent a couple of emails with mistakes in, now I have to go back to re-reading three or four times to check, annoying and a waste of my time.
I used to like outlook but I am really going off it to the point that I am thinking of quitting altogether.
- Yes, a million times please FIX this, who was the brain trust who thought changing the which mount button brought up the spell checker to be different than literately EVERY application including the MS desktop apps?
- This is the worst design decision I've seen in a long time. This stupid feature has caused me to delete so many emails without even realizing. If the focus is on an email in the list (not sure how it stays there when I'm typing in to the email window) then I click in a word to correct it, press the backspace button to manually correct it and bam, email is deleted. I've reverted back to old outlook until this BUG is resolved. I call it a bug because no one would willingly make such a horrible design choice.
Found a link to a request for this feature. Let's upvote it. Right now, it actually doesn't have that many votes, so perhaps those of us who can't believe MS would break a standard UI feature that's been there for at least two decades and still remains in all the other Office and Windows apps are in the minority. But let's upvote it and hopefully we'll at least get this added as an option.
https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/a64c0d46-4414-ee11-a81c-000d3a7a48db
DrenCrossley, is the link to upvote this fix broken for you too? It looks like Microsoft removed that link.
Or did they fix this? It's still not working for me in New Outlook, but maybe it is for some, or it's been added as an option and I just don't know how to enable it?
If this is still a problem, the next most up-voted version of this I can find is this one, with a mere 15 upvotes at the time of this post: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/5d905769-b166-ee11-a81c-0022484e5453
