Personal Tech

Client's handy automations get grayed out unless you know the keyboard shortcut

If you're using Quick Steps in Microsoft Outlook and wondering why they're grayed out, a bug introduced in version 2512 is the culprit.

Classic Outlook is approaching the twilight years of its prodigiously long life, but users can still fall victim to productivity-killing bugs – in this case, a problem with Quick Steps.

Quick Steps automates common or repetitive tasks in Outlook. Always have to move a bunch of messages to a specific folder? Quick Steps is your friend. Pin an email and mark it as unread? Again, the actions can be lined up in Quick Steps and executed with a single click or a keyboard shortcut.

Until Microsoft breaks it.

In a support article , Microsoft has confirmed that in some situations, Quick Steps in classic Outlook can appear grayed out. The workaround (if rolling back or switching clients isn't an option) is to use a keyboard shortcut.…