The 50/50 Rule

CTRL+F and Outlook 2010: will Microsoft follow Google into design by engineers - istartedsomething

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CTRL-F in Outlook

Gerod Serafin's WebLog — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 23:49:20 GMT

Does anyone else find the fact that you have to do an F4 in Outlook to Find something extremely annoying?&nbsp;...

re: The 50/50 Rule

It bites but so what??? — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 17:41:18 GMT

So there is a reason behind why the short cut keys ended up the way they did. I could not care less. (Except it is a good example for this article)
The only thing I want to know is where I can find a hack or a registry setting that will let me use CTRL+F for find, as I would in any other normal application. You can customize all other Office applications in various ways so why is Outlook so crappy???

re: The 50/50 Rule

ErickThompson — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 03:39:24 GMT

This seems like the perfect place to use a dialog prompt on the first use. The first time a user uses control-F, ask them what action they want it to perform. That way, both groups get the functionality that they want.

I would personally love to see this, as I hit ctrl-F to do a find all the time, as I spend most of my day in Visual Studio.

Erick

re: The 50/50 Rule

Stephen McLaren — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 23:54:28 GMT

I remember when I first made the switch from the Acorn OS (every school in the UK had them!) to Windows and being incredibly frustrated that Ctrl-S "didn't work properly".
I was so used to Ctrl-S changing the case of the selected text that I spent a long time saving my document every minute or so. This was on Office '97 which if I recall correctly didn't autocorrect capitilisation errors...

re: The 50/50 Rule

cw — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 20:05:07 GMT

Joe Surfer wrote:

"Control-F should Find in Outlook, because that's what Control-F does in every other application. Outlook is the odd-man-out here.

Who uses just Outlook, and no other office product? Almost nobody. So almost all Outlook users know that Control-F is used to Find.

This isn't a 50-50 rule, this is a 99-1 rule. "

You're writing this in 2006. Back in 1993-1994 when Capone was developed, CTRL-F was NOT the de facto keyboard shortcut for Find, unless you were used to using Macs.

re: The 50/50 Rule

pli7 — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 15:42:06 GMT

On the topic of keyboard shortcuts, I'm wondering if your usage data shows how often people actually use key combos such as Ctrl-Alt-X, Alt-Shift-F2, etc.

I, for one, never use such key combos because they are hard to press and difficult to remember and confusing. And I've never seen any friend or coworker use these combos. Just wondering.

re: The 50/50 Rule

Andrew Herron — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 10:12:47 GMT

I'm with Josh - Shift-Del, Ctrl-Ins, and Shift-Ins are ingrained in my psyche because I find them much easier to hit than ctrl+x/c/v due to the space on the left of Ins/Del. A few modern apps are starting to remove those shortcuts and I hate them for it.

It is for this reason that I absolutely despise the new keyboard styles with the massive del key and no insert except on the numpad :)

re: The 50/50 Rule

BradA — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 09:52:36 GMT

You had me the whole way -- I thought for sure you were going to tell me the how to design my way out of the 50/50 rule... but all I get is "When the 50/50 rule bites you, it leaves a mark"

Oh well... I still have that Susan B Anthony dollar around here somewhere...
;-)

re: The 50/50 Rule

josh — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 08:24:05 GMT

I *still* use Shift-Del, Ctrl-Ins, and Shift-Ins... not F4 though.