Do you agree that products always have room for improvement?
"Every day there are little things in software that we find annoying. Some write books about it, like Annoyances.org, but I thought this site would be more constructive.
BetterSoftwareSuggestions.com is proudly maintained by myself and the developers at SSW."
- Adam Cogan 
Users of the Google Toolbar may be familiar with the Highlight option, which highlights all occurrences of the current search keywords in the current document. This is a very handy feature and it would be good to see it in all Microsoft Office applications as well.
Figure: Google highlight option in use
It would be nice if Office stored all of its settings files in a readable format. For example, if the settings files were stored as XML, then the user could clearly see the settings that were applied, and also be able to import/export parts of the settings files themselves (this is different to the current system where you have an all-or-nothing approach to the import/export of settings).
Figure: Settings files are stored in binary format, they should be XML
But what about invalid xml?
Just give the user a message something like: “Someone has changed with the xml and now it is invalid. Reverting to default settings.”
Note: Have renamed the file to zzWord11.xml so that they can attempt to fix it if they want to.
We share our calendars and one of the things that screws scheduling meetings, is because many people put in a non-appointments as appointments (people look busy when they are not). e.g. ‘Pay rent’ when they actually just need an email each Tuesday.
There is another advantage to removing appointments of this type, people get fewer reminders. So they don’t get desensitized to extra reminders that are not time critical.
PS: I don’t really want to install an outlook add-in (but I’ll take anything)
Figure:’Pay Rent’ just another non-appointment as an appointment – because of missing functionality in Outlook/Exchange
Figure: these 2 words need to be added to the spell check library, or include specific suggestions to fix
For the last few years, I have been hoping that Scott Guthrie would give us a rich text field in Silverlight (and supported copying and pasting images on the clipboard)… Like Word gives us today.
Would it be better for IE9 to give us an awesome Rich Text Control that does this?
I am thinking about the use in CRM, TFS and SharePoint; however every blog out there could use it in their comments…
And everyone would want to use IE over the other browsers.
Here is just one example of people kind of requesting this feature on codeplex:
http://codeplex.codeplex.com/workitem/4756
Allow formatting in comments
Here is an other
At http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/community/add/ff400237.aspx
Figure: This does not allow adding an image (ideally you want to paste from the clipboard)
1. Add a new tab
An example: There is a known issue in the Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 RTW. Where does Microsoft put it? I am not sure, but I expect to find it on the product page.\ The product page in this case, is where I downloaded it.
E.g. http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/59ac03e3-df99-4776-be39-1917cbfc5d8e
2. Add a record into it
E.g. This is one entry I would like you to add to this new tab:
Date format bug in the Sprint Burndown report in Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 RTW.
If you are in a non US locale, this prevents the current sprint being calculated and the report falls over with an error:
Query execution failed for dataset 'dsSprintsCurrent'.(rsErrorExecutingCommand) The conversion of a nvarchar data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range value. The fix is to change the RDL.
Open the Sprint Burndown RDL file.
Change the “Today” parameter from “Text” to “DateTime”:
<ReportParameter Name="Today"> <DataType>DateTime</DataType> <DefaultValue > <Values> <Value>=today</Value> </Values> </DefaultValue> <Hidden>true</Hidden> </ReportParameter>
Figure: On the Outbox, wish it had an extra menu item “Send selected (3 emails)”
Figure: Using categories is great for mailing to a group of people
I want to send an email to those tagged with ‘iphone’…
How would I do it?
Figure: Add an entry after ‘Contacts’… As I would expect to find ‘Contacts of a certain category’ here
Figure: Looking for “Email” option on the right hand side… or it could be called “Send email to Selection”
Figure: Bingo… found it on the Actions menu
So I would change
“Create | New Message to Contact”
to
“Send email to Selection”
Figure: When opening a contact, support multiple selection
Regarding http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832925
I didn’t have any of the registry keys and I found the article a bit confusing. Especially when I could not copy and paste from the article to regedit.
The worse thing is that copy and paste from the KB to outlook fails. So I have 4 suggestions for the KB:
#A – Add another column
Figure: #1 Add a column in front to indicate ANSI or Unicode
#B – Copy & paste from the KB doesn’t work because regedit doesn’t allow 0x0000c800 as hex number
Figure: You should be able to copy and paste from the KB to the Regedit
#C – Add a little explanation on how to get the HEX numbers
E.g.:
#D – How do I know that my changes were applied?
Tell me?