Outlook Web Access Calendar

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From: Smylers
Subject: Outlook Web Access Calendar
Date: 16:30 on 25 Jul 2006
Outlook Web Access[*0] is so easy hate, but here's the one that's just
bitten me.

'New Appointment' has, quite reasonably, 'Start time' and 'End time',
each with drop-down fields for day, month, and year, in that order.
Both default to today.

I set 'Start time' to "30 August 2006", and 'End time' is automatically
updated to the same.

I set the day field of 'End time' to 1 and tab to the next field, where
I change "August" to "September", then I submit the thing.  Only then to
notice that it's turned a 3-day event into a month-long one!

On trying to repeat the exercise I discover that after I set the end day
to "1", Outlook changed it back again to "30".  Apparently its
JavaScript couldn't cope with the fields saying "1 August 2006" (which
is before the start date) even transitionally -- even though I'd just
left the day field so as to set the month!

Hate!!

Under what circumstances could I have possibly wanted the behaviour I
What right has Outlook got to decide that even though I picked the 1st
of the month it is going to change this -- and do it silently, so that I
don't even spot it happening!

Surely if I've just set the day to "1" then the one thing you can be
sure of is that I want the day to be "1"; if that creates an
inconsistency then update the _other_ fields, the ones I haven't yet
set, to resolve the matter, you idiot.

How can it possibly make sense to insist on setting the date fields in
descending order of magnitude yet display them (and have their tabbing)
in ascending order?

My guess is that the field order is localized, and this was developed by
people with a locale which has month before day, so that it didn't bite
them (well, unless they have the completely stupid order of
month-day-year and tried to schedule an event over December to January,
but obviously they didn't test that much) and then shipped the thing
treating localizations as being purely cosmetic.  Hate.

  [*0]  Actually I only have experience of the non-Internet-Explorer
  version.  I believe that WinIE gets a much-souped-up version, but
  really, what's the point in that?  If I were on Windows then I
  wouldn't be needing to use Outlook Web Access anyway cos Outlook
  itself would run there.

Smylers

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