I’m a lot like you. For the most part, I try to look beyond the question being asked, and find the root cause. If the root cause is because of a skill issue, I’ll direct them to the next logical resource. If it’s not a skill issue, or I can’t determine that it’s a skill issue, then I’ll continue to test until I can make that determination.
9 times out of 10, if I find a solution to make a thing work in a program, I’ll share that with them, and let them take it from there.
A lot of the people I support are working in the finance space and my company has an entire support department for finance applications. I’ll either bounce the problem off of them, or just direct them to the finance support team for guidance.
This wasn’t either of those things. It wasn’t even asking how. It was straight up telling me to do a thing for them, in a program they should know how to use. It’s not a complex finance program or anything, it’s literally Outlook.
Outlook is a long list unto itself of random crap that’s probably going to go wrong.
To be fair, it’s not like word or Excel are any less complex, but people tend to know those apps way better for some reason.
The Web version is taking over. Just like they did with teams, they’re starting a webview version of Outlook. They’re very creative this time, calling it “new Outlook” 🤦♂️
It’s all very dumb.
I completely agree on the view settings too. It’s like a world unto itself just to sort and organize a single view of Outlook. I helped one user the other day, who simply wanted to see everything as conversations. It’s an easy fix, and it wasn’t the reason they logged a ticket, but it took about 8 seconds and I was already connected to their system.
Do office workers not have a requirement to learn basic MS office skills anymore?