Microsoft

Various Microsoft irritations to report, following the major irritation noticed at reference 1.

First, without any invitation from myself, the colours used in the calendar changed and the colours used to mark various errors of spelling and grammar changed. With unannounced changes of this sort always making me worry about whether some sensible default setting or other has come unstuck. Or, shock horror, something deep to do with synchronisation has broken.

Second, I noticed that calendar entries which took place more than a few weeks ago get deleted. So it is not possible, for example, to check when you went on holiday last summer. Google suggests that people have been moaning about this for years, without effect.

Third, I am finding the errors of grammar which are getting flagged a bit tiresome. Some of them are fair enough, help one get away without careful proof reading, helpful even, but some of them are very obscure, possibly implementing some obscure rule of grammar, but not relevant to the 21st century. One is then stuck with having irritating blue double underlinings all over the place or turning the feature off altogether. Which doesn't seem very clever either.

Maybe Microsoft have got too clever here, trying to check things which are more a matter of taste and style than rules, and would do better to pull back a bit. Are they trying to enforce the sort of dull, corporate English which they might well insist on in internal communications on the rest of us?

PS: maybe not such a big deal for those who have access to good quality corporate IT support functions who understand all this user facing stuff and can deal with what can be dealt with for you. In any event, to explain what is going on when they dump some update on you. But not so clever for the private punter like myself.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/grumpy-user.html.