Sorting Emails in The New Outlook

Agreed. I am less efficient and less effective in accomplishing my daily and weekly tasks and goals with the "NEW" Outlook. The MS product management team and market requirements people built and released a version worse than the previous one. It's as if they did not take any surveys or user input into their decision-making process. They are incompetent and should be replaced with people that have a clue as to what they are doing.

Totally agree. Amongst the other issues I am struggling with the contrast is right up there. I find it so hard to focus with the new formatting they use.

Totally agree. The New Outlook took away MANY of the UX neat functionalities that makes us efficient. The sorting is a pain in the neck and slow my productivity down A LOT. I am not able to group and filter the conversation so easily and that slows me down. I use the simply click and sort by From or Subject to group conversations probably a million times per day and now it's insane that I need to increase the # of steps and clicks to get where I want. Just painful.

On top of that, the contrast is not there to guide the eyes. Pretty-ness is a NICE TO HAVE where as basic functionalities are MUST HAVES. The color code in pastel rainbows is NOT helpful at all when it comes to efficiency in the Calendar.

Hello,

I went out of my way to come here and share this after having spent a couple of precious hours navigating the "New" Outlook.

This is the version it says under settings that I have:

You have Microsoft Outlook Version1.2023.927.100*(Production). Client Version is*20230929003.10 

Despite the neat and clean look and feel, I cannot wrap my head around something very basic that I (and I'm sure countless others) have become so accustomed to on the legacy Outlook, but let's call that the 'normal' Outlook, except that it simply vanished from the new edition.

I used to be able to sort emails by "From" and then start typing the name of the sender WITHOUT using the Search bar. This was a massive convenience as the way the results appear is different than how they appear when using the Search bar. Let's say I am searching for emails from 'Michael Lee' in this way. I will click Filter > Arrange By > From and immediately type the sender's name. Outlook would simply re-sort (not search) all the emails and the results will show emails from Michael Lee grouped under Michael Lee and sorted date-wise. If you got the spelling wrong, no biggie, simply collapse all the name groups so scrolling down is super quick. This was fantastic and something I thought would carry on to the New Outlook except that there is no such function there and this is bothering me to no end.

If this is the case, my question here is, why still have the Filter by Name function when a user can neither pull up the name they want nor collapse the name groups. Same for sorting by Subject. Once it is sorted by Subject, there is nothing one can do except to scroll down randomly.

As I manage the company's email accounts as an admin, I was on the phone with the MS365 representative and inquired whether the New Outlook I switched to is a fully launched product or still in beta, he confirmed it is fully operational and I am not using a sneak peek version of something under development. He also flatly suggested I can revert back to the normal Outlook. I know Microsoft is getting ready to remove Mail soon and one day down the line we all will be forced to use this New Outlook.

The annoying thing about the legacy Outlook is that the Red Flag button and the Delete Email icon are super close to each other. (see screenshot below)

Sorry to say this but apparently this is how it got approved by the Microsoft product leadership levels. That the distance between the email you want to trash and a super important one should be less than a cursor space. So that important email can be accidentally deleted! The New Outlook made a modest improvement in placement of the Flag and Trash bin icons (and increased distance between them to about two cursors lol) but then the sort feature is a major dealbreaker. My question is also, if ever there was any forum/platform Microsoft used to consult with users on how they use Outlook before deciding to do away with certain features that many consider to be in the DNA of Outlook?

I've just found a workaround which is slightly easier. I receive emails from several colleagues regularly, and I often need to search by name to locate one of their last emails. New Outlook was a nuisance in that I thought you couldn't "find by name"... but now you can. So, select an email in your inbox from the person whose other emails you wish to find, then without opening it, right click on it, and at the bottom of the list you should see "find related". Click on this, and it offers two further options, one of which is ...."messages from this sender", or you can select ...."messages in this conversation", both of which are helpful, and should solve your frustration, a little, for now.