Pretty much everything from Microsoft at the moment feels like a huge construction site. Skype is becoming worse with every update. Windows 10 is better on Desktop than 8 (which is not saying much), but pretty much unusable in Tablet mode now (especially in conjunction with the onscreen keyboard). System settings are all over the place. HiDPI hasn't been solved even remotely, especially in comparison to OSX. I can't get Outlook setup with Gmail correctly, which in turn was only necessary because the built-in Contacts doesn't talk correctly to Gmail either, without a useful error message. I really have to question anything and anyone in conjunction with MS software right now...
I agree that it is a terrible error message. Unfortunately Microsoft doesn't take as much care with their Mac products as their Windows versions of the same, you can see this throughout the history of MS Office for Mac.
As an aside: Do error messages with only one button ("ok") hint at a design problem? I often find that if you're presenting an alert() style error, you've done something wrong before that which could be improved to provide greater user feedback (e.g. turn the "bad" item red, and add a label, etc).
I wouldn't go as far as to say that alert() style errors are NEVER the right answer, but when you find yourself using them you should re-examine if you absolutely had to. They often hint at poor or lazy design.
> Secondly, what an ignorant unhelpful error message is this?
What is it people think the word ignorant means? The sentence seems to make sense otherwise, "unhelpful error message" is fine as a stand-alone. But ignorant error message? Is the error message meant to be safe aware?
Regarding the MS products on Mac - I have only installed Outlook for Mac because the web (Office 365) version of Outlook lacks most of the advanced functionality in the first place. I was hoping I will be able to apply a rule to existing emails (not only those that will come in future) or perform an action on batch of emails. In the end this is not possible on the Mac version either.
I've long held such sentiment for MS. Thing is, I've been staring to hate on Apple for such digressions as well... It's nice to be reassured that it's still objectively worse over in PC-land.
This happened to me a while back. The only way I could "fix" it was to close Outlook, discarding all my changes. I then made the same changes but saved the rules after every tiny change. Somehow the changes all saved and I moved on.
I wonder if the state somehow becomes corrupted and Outlook has no idea what to do, hence the error.
You should take a look through the error messages in Windows event viewer some time. And then press on "more info" which takes you to MSDN and says the equivalent of "there was an error in windows"
