Outlook keep resetting ribbon back to default after changes

This response was obviously written by a bot. That's not a human response.

Are you friggen kidding? Resetting peoples settings is an intentional design? This is the dumbest thing I've heard and why I use a Mac for anything not required by my work.

"But with Windows you have more control and customization than a Mac, there are 10 trillion minute infinitely customizable details. We included so many you literally won't be able to find how to tweak what should be basic available changes. Like in Outlook, we think you should only get to make the docked calendar so small so we limit the sizing. But you can go into settings and find a way to set preview columns literally down to the pixel. But the good news is once you get everything set up to how YOU prefer, we are going to reset it to how we like it. Because we care about the user"

Sadly what you say is true. I started using Office and Outlook in the 90's and even then it was obvious that MacOS was a better operating system, however most of the software that I use(d) at that time wasn't available for Macs and in any case MS already had the business world enslaved to their ecosystem. While their products are often buggy and they love to flout their arrogant assumption that all of their customers are helpless idiots, one thing you can't deny is that Bill Gates, Steve Balmer and now Satya Nadella, have all understood that you don't necessarily need a great product in order to capture the market, just a great marketing strategy.

So for better or for worse I have stayed with Windows (and learned to skip every second version) since my first PC and now I'm too old (or too lazy) to migrate. My kids, who are smarter than me, all have Macs.

Well, it turns out that I was a overly optimistic. Today I had a couple of icons graciously shoved back on the inbox ribbon by the all-knowing managers of Microsoft (they obviously were quite sure that I had removed the icons by mistake and desperately needed them...). Fortunately this only happened on the inbox ribbon, none of the others were changed (for now).

Nevertheless the frequency of MS invasiveness is MUCH lower than before so I'll keep the registry item for now and keep the form updated

The other thing I've done to 'lock' my ribbons is make the .officeUI files read only in this folder: %localappdata%\Microsoft\Office

This is the most important one to lock:

Main UI - olkexplorer.officeUI

The other ones you might want to try locking are:

Calendar Item - olkapptitem.officeUI

Contact Item - olkaddritem.officeUI

Mail Appointment, Responding - olkresponseread.officeUI

Mail Meeting Requests - olkmreqread.officeUI

Mail Reading - olkmailread.officeUI

Mail Sending - olkmailitem.officeUI

When I want to make a change, I take off read only and make sure I put it back after I'm done.

This design is absolutely absurd. It just goes to show you that this program should go back to alpha and only released again when this design model is converted to one that everyone will want to use. By allowing people to change a setting, yet the program will not keep the changes it a design flaw. Maybe the design team needs an actual manager that works. Please fix this problem immediately.

I beg to differ. The problem is NOT a bug in the design of the Outlook program, the problem (and it is indeed a big problem for millions of Outlook users) almost certainly stems from a conscious decision made by MS managers, probably in the marketing dept.

I have been using Outlook for close to 30 years, both in an organization and privately and I have found it to be a very efficient and robust environment which is also continually evolving (as happens in many types of software). Over the years some of the new features I liked and found useful and others I didn't, but this ribbon "feature" is one of the few that actually makes me angry because it is impossible to disable (again probably a marketing decision) . As I have said in previous posts, "features" like the constantly changing ribbon are yet another display of Microsoft's arrogance and galling assumption that they know what is best for their users.

I already save the customized ribbon as you suggest. I use it to restore my customized ribbon. The problem is that Microsoft keeps overriding the customized ribbon with the default ribbon so I have to restore it. This problem has arisen recently. For years it was not a problem. It does not seem to be a problem with Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.

Yes, the problem is much more pronounced in recent years and it is a real nuisance to constantly restore the ribbon from backups (as you noted this issue does not seem to affect other Office 365 apps). The focus on Outlook and pushing icons back on the ribbon seems to be part of a marketing strategy to push users to use the new "features"; it also may be part of broader strategy: there are persistent rumors that MS is ultimately planning to phase out the desktop Office 365 apps in order to push everyone to the web-based versions.