Sorting Emails in The New Outlook

Anonymous
2023-10-04T23:39:12+00:00

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?

Outlook | Windows | New Outlook for Windows | For home

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-05-16T22:44:35+00:00

    Eben, it has been 6mths & nothing has changed, if you doubt the seriousness of the problem please note that we are now at 10 pages of comments. Please do not reply with another "soft response" but rather advise what Microsoft is going to do about this & when. Note that this has also been raised in Microsoft Portal, with the same lack of response from Microsoft.

    In the meantime I will continue to use Legacy Outlook, sinc the newer version is not fit for purpose.

    Thanks

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-05-16T21:09:49+00:00

    I am another person exasperated by the way that simple to do things in the old Outlook have been changed or - it appears - removed in New Outlook. I don't know about Microsoft World but everywhere else 'New' implies better, faster, easier.

    I made what appears to be the most unwise of decisions to move to a new PC - not transfer anything from the old one (both Lenovo ThinkPads - high spec) ither than to use One Drive for my personal documents. I have spent more than hours - significant numbers of man days over the past month or more trying to figure out loads of inconsistencies and search for solutions, liaising with MS365 support and when I thought I'd finally got to the end *huh!) of my difficulties tonight I wanted to sort all the emails in one of my inboxes in Outlook to find all messages from one particular sender, so that I could mark them all and move them all into a subfolder in the mailbox. In old Outlook it was just a question of clicking on 'sort messages by' and choosing the option I wanted - 'From, to, date, subject' maybe there were others.

    In New Outlook this really useful tool has vanished and there's no way to do this. It really is terrible indifference to millions (billions!) of users who for decades probably have used the function. If I'd been given a list of all the things that changed or that had disappeared from New Outlook I never would have changed. I only did so on on the advice of a MS365 support person to solve another problem.

    Trouble is MS knows it has us all by the balls - too committed and familiar with the platform to want to move away, and therefore suckers for your but this change must surely be a greater waste of users' time than the Covid pandemic!

    And all you can say on behalf of MS is 'well you can go back to the old Outlook' (until we've done what we should have done before releasing the new version. Heads should be rolling in Product Management!

    Now I have hours more work to do to manually find some couple of hundred messages and the lo9ng and hard and inefficient way.

    Please don't respond with apologies for my 'inconvenience' - I'm sick of seeing those (probably auto added to emails from support) - tell us all WHEN you will replicate essential key features!

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-04-16T17:02:03+00:00

    looks like I'm in the going back to the last version boat as well.

    Microsoft dropped the ball on this one.

    not to mention the spelling check. the whole world does spelling on right click

    Microsoft has now for some reason put it under the left???? Why? now its deferent than every other app and you have to think twice.

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-04-16T17:01:23+00:00

    looks like I'm in the going back to the last version boat as well.

    Microsoft dropped the ball on this one.

    not to mention the spelling check. the whole world does spelling on right click

    Microsoft has now for some reason put it under the left???? Why? now its deferent than every other app and you have to think twice.

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-04-12T09:27:01+00:00

    I have only just discovered this thread and realising this simple feature has not been included in the New Outlook.

    Is there any update or likelihood of this changing soon? If not, back to old Outlook I go.... how annoying!!

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