I've noticed something rather nasty about Office 2013. For some reason that I cannot correlate to any action on my part the Outlook UI (as an example) will suddenly start showing garbage and artifacts in the ribbon and the tree on the left, as well as trashing or hiding parts of messages in previews.

At first I was chalking it up to a laptop that was a couple of years old and, maybe, it was having some graphics issues (even though no other apps were suffering). However, now that I've gotten a new laptop, I am seeing the same issues. I noticed a flag in the options titled "disable hardware acceleration" and I checked that to "on".  No luck. Still getting garbage now and then which hides information from me. Hiding or trashing information is kind of a "no-no" when it happens within an app that is trying to sell itself as "enterprise class."

At any rate, I am not hoping for any actual response to this in terms of real help. Instead, my intention is to get one - just one - senior developer at MS to ask themselves "Why do we choose to deviate from the rest of planet earth in the way that we choose to display things. It doesn't count as 'cutting edge' or 'innovation' because it often doesn't work right during some relatively basic operations. In those cases we look extra bad because - unlike all the other developers on earth - we wrote the OS too. We own the entire stack and therefore have literally no excuse. Maybe we should just be normal within the apps that form the bulk of our cash flow."

...that's all I guess.

• Changed type Luna Zhang - MSFTMicrosoft contingent staff Tuesday, October 07, 2014 6:43 AM
• Moved by Cindy Meister MVPMVP 16 hours 25 minutes ago not developer-related

Hello,

> will suddenly start showing garbage and artifacts in the ribbon and the tree on the left, as well as trashing or hiding parts of messages in previews

Could you please take a screenshot of graphics issues you see on your machines?

Do you have any antivirus software installed on the PCs?

No, thank you.

I appreciate that you are interested in root causing this. I am not. Let me restate my original intention: Microsoft -- Please stop doing exotic things with apps that enterprises depend on.

That being said, why would it matter if I have antivirus programs installed? If MicroSoft has done something with the UI layer of office that anti virus software can interfere with, then that's not something I want to know about. Rather, it would indicate to me that I need to find an alternative solution from a software vendor which isn't doing something so strange with something so routine.

Actually -- I know I said I didn't want to help, but this is just so funny. I have to close and restart Office apps a few times per day because of this. ...just SMH.

This image is from an email that I opened and then, seemingly without provocation, it did this to itself:



• Edited by MrManMan Tuesday, January 27, 2015 8:33 PM

lol



It is a glitch. I have never seen such pics on my screen.

Check out your hardware. I'd suggest starting from video card drivers.

...Why yes. yes it is. This is an office-only glitch. It can only be resolved by uninstalling (or not using) office. See initial post: There's nothing wrong with my hardware or drivers, nor are any other apps on my machine experiencing this app-suicide.

If anyone on the Office team cares -- I believe this glitching behavior to be related to how I orient my taskbar. When I place it on the left of the screen (where I would like it to be) then office screws up its UI several times per day. When I put my taskbar on the bottom of the screen (where MS would like it to be) then the UI seems much more stable with zero glitching events so far. Given how I see it rendering text during the glitching state, it seems clear that it is having a coordinate translation issue, which makes sense if the Office developers forgot you can move the taskbar and just didn't account for it in some common scenarios...

• Edited by MrManMan Monday, May 11, 2015 4:06 PM

Could you prepare a sample add-in (a newly created clean one) which can reproduce the issue?

I will test it on my PC with Outlook 2013 installed.

Nope... I take it back. It's gone full-moron again.

No, I'm afraid I cannot do that from this computer for corporate security reasons.

I will, however, tell you that this is a Lenovo T540p. I suspect that a certain combination of video hardware and driver, perhaps in addition to McAfee nanny-ware are exposing what my original complaint is about: that Microsoft has chosen to architect a UI solution in a cash-cow, "enterprise class" email bloat-client that is susceptible to interference by those things whereas no other applications on this machine are. It's comically bad considering who wrote it.

I don't think so. Most probably the issue depends on the code you have got in the solution. That's why I asked to reproduced the issue with a sample add-in.

I don't follow... what code are you referring to? Perhaps an add-in that I might have installed?

Hi MrManMan

If you find your exchange with Eugene somewhat confusing it's because you've posted in a forum dedicated to supporting programmers writing code for Office applications and the assumption is the problem you're seeing is occurring when your code is running in the application.

The IT Pro forums in the TechNet set of forums would be the better place to get assistance. But none of these forums is monitored by the "Office team" - support is peer-to-peer plus contractors hired by Microsoft.

For general feedback:
https://support2.microsoft.com/contactus/emailcontact.aspx?scid=sw;en;1539

FWIW, the standard approach to trouble-shoot your problem is to get updated video card AND printer drivers from the manufacturers. They test their products against each new version of Office and update the drivers to work with technology changes.

Do you want to know what's confusing? Try being a customer using office and seeking help or trying to give Microsoft information which will help it improve the products. I can only conclude that Microsoft is actively avoiding end-user feedback. I posted my comments here in an attempt to stop wasting time looking for the right place. In that sense, if Microsoft cares about this feedback, then let the appropriate team come read it -- I don't work for Microsoft so I will not be doing their paperwork.

To that end - I replaced the laptop at some point. All drivers were up to date on the last one, and are up to date on this one. The problem persisted over all changes described and continues to amuse me as I have to resize open emails in order to get it to repaint itself and restore the garbled text, or restart the app entirely as it pukes all over it's folder tree and ribbon buttons -- a couple of times per day usually. And, as I've noted, it's the only app on my laptop doing this.