Views are too easy to change

[David H.]

My users complain that their views get corrupted: the "From" field
disappears from their Inbox, or messages seem to disappear because the list
has been sorted by the "attachment" field. It is disruptive to them to have
to use the Field chooser or "customize..." command to fix these changes.
What's most frustrating is that these casual changes are the same as
actually "customizing" the view. So a complex view, carefully customized
with a multiple-field sort order, can be lost in a twinkling.
It would be nice if they could "lock" the view -- like one can lock the
Taskbar -- so they do not change it accidentally. Almost as good would be if
they could easily restore a saved view from file, or anything like that.
But, no, all they can do is "reset" a named view to the settings that came
with Outlook.
Does anyone have any suggestions? How do you help users recover when their
Inbox has lost most of its fields?

 

[Roady [MVP]]

Views do not change automatically; it will require end-user actions.
If they often need to make some changes to their view, it would be better to
define views of their own instead of modifying the default Messages view.
When they do that, all they have to do is select a different view and don't
have to go into the view settings every time.