I use Outlook mainly because I deal with huge volumes of email that I need to shift around into folders and groupings. Overall I'm pretty happy with Outlook even though there are lots of people who complain about how slow and unwieldy it is, but to me personally Outlooks rich desktop interface is still hugely preferable to the clunky Web interfaces from the major email providers.

But there are some things really piss me off and for Office in general most of the piss off points are due to the damn UI choices made with the silly Ribbon interface Microsoft has bestowed on me.

Today I was replying to a message in Outlook when I inadvertently hit some key combination that triggered formatting marks to be enabled in any messages that I reply to. It's not the first time my fat fingers have gotten me into a sticky situation like this.

Of course I have no idea which key combo I hit, but I ended up stuck with this mess:

The task now became how do I undo this option? Or more to the point - where do I find this option on the toolbars/ribbon. So I spent about 20 minutes hunting through the Ribbon's Reply Message interface trying to find the formatting display options and I came up blank.

In the end it turns out the setting is configured in the general message options which are available from the main menu button only on the Reply form (Click on the big round button and then Editor options in the bottom right corner):

Uncheck the box and I'm on my way.

But finding this and many other non-everyday-options is a royal pain. It's even worse in large apps like Word where the menu and ribbon literally contain thousands of options. While some things are in obvious locations, the ribbon has reduced the number of items that you can get to LOGICALLY. If you're looking for advanced options or settings your not likely to find them on the ribbon or just as likely find them in some odd completely unexpected location. Say what you will about traditional menus being complex when they get deeply nested but they allow you maintain a hierarchy that can be arranged logically. The ribbon on the other hand makes easy things easy to find (which was also easy before) and makes it nearly impossible to find the complex  options that are purposefully buried because they are 'specialty' items.