Friday, July 28, 2006

Usability in MS Outlook Tasks

I really love the way the MS Outlook's Task List Due Date field works. You can input dates in a variety of fashions and I am not talking about the MMDDYYYY, DDMMYY formats. Here are a few examples -

So if today is 28 July 2006 (Friday)
You can type

  1. W - (next week) - 4 Aug 2006 (Friday)
  2. 2W - (n weeks from now) - 11 Aug 2006 (Friday)
  3. Y, nY - (n years from now) - 28 July 2007 (Saturday)
  4. 3D - (n Days from today) -31 July 2007 (Monday)
  5. Aug - (next August, and other months work) - 28 Aug 2006 (Monday)
  6. Monday - (next Monday) - 31 July 2006 (Monday) (works for all the days of the week)
  7. Today - 28 July 2006 (Friday)
  8. 29 - 29 July 2006 (Saturday)
  9. 2007 - 28 July 2007 (Saturday)
  10. Aug 3 - 3 Aug 2006 (Thursday)
  11. 2 Wed - (n Wednesdays from the next one :-) ) - 16 Aug 2006 (Wednesday)
Some behave unexpectedly e.g. 3 Aug gives me a 3 Aug 2007 while 16 Aug gives me 16 Aug 2006. Not sure why.

M also behaves unexpectedly always returning today's date.

W1D, 2D3W work as well :-) I am sure there are many more that I missed.

I readily agree that some examples are extreme but what I found quite interesting was that someone put so much effort in making this component so you can type dates in an extraordinary number of ways and most times I find it does what you expect it to.