Way to turn off "show in Groups" globally

[Barry Watzman]

When I look at E-Mail folders in Outlook (2003), by default "show in
groups" (View / Arrange by / Show in Groups) is turned on.

It's clear how to turn this off for any single folder, but is there a
way to turn it off globally? I have over 1,000 folders in my E-Mail PST
file.

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

do you have many custom views? if not, the best way is to restart outlook
using the /cleanviews switch. Then go to View, Arrange By, Current view,
Define view and choose Messages, then modify and change the grouping.

if you have a lot of custom views, you can try changing the grouping in
Views but it may not work for all folders.

 

[Barry Watzman]

I have NO custom views.

When I go to View / Arrange By / Current View / Define View / Messages,
"Group By" is set to "none"

Yet, any folders on which I have not explicitly turned off "Arrange in
Groups" are still showing "groups" by date.

There should be a way to turn this off globally be default, even if it
means using regedit. And for future versions, there should be an easy
way to do this.

do you have many custom views? if not, the best way is to restart outlook
using the /cleanviews switch. Then go to View, Arrange By, Current view,
Define view and choose Messages, then modify and change the grouping.

if you have a lot of custom views, you can try changing the grouping in
Views but it may not work for all folders.

file.

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

you have one-off views - that's why you need to open outlook using the
cleanviews switch, then customize the view in the define views dialog.

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Author, Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
Coauthor, OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)

 

[Barry Watzman]

It did not work, the only thing that it accomplished was resetting the
hundreds of folders on which I'dm manually turned off "show in groups"
so that they are now, again, showing in groups. Ugh !!!

There needs to be a single check box under view / options to do this.
It was insane to set such a default with no way to globally turn it off.

 

[Jeff Johnson [MVP: VB]]

There needs to be a single check box under view / options to do this.
It was insane to set such a default with no way to globally turn it off.

I wholeheartedly agree.

Note to Microsoft: If you're going to make a change to the way things work,
at least give us an easy way to change it back! It was bad enough that some
yahoo felt that "Hide underlined letters until I press the Alt key" should
be the UI default starting with Windows 2000, but at least we got a way to
turn that off via the UI itself. Then came the "sort files containing
numbers by the value of the number instead of a pure alpha sort" in Windows
XP. That required a registry setting to change (back). Now here's this
stupid "show in groups" default that has to be changed on a per-folder basis
because there's absolutely NO way to do it globally. STOP IT STOP IT STOP
IT!!!

 

[Guest]

AMEN!!! Your last paragraph should be mandatory reading for all programmers and product development folks who THINK they know a better way for us to do our work! Once we've gotten used to a known set of rules or parameters they should really think twice about changing the rules! If a programmer adds a new "feature", there should at least be a way to disable or bypass that feature.

 

[Theodore Heise]

I wholeheartedly agree.

Note to Microsoft: If you're going to make a change to the way
things work, at least give us an easy way to change it back! It
was bad enough that some yahoo felt that "Hide underlined
letters until I press the Alt key" should be the UI default
starting with Windows 2000, but at least we got a way to turn
that off via the UI itself. Then came the "sort files containing
numbers by the value of the number instead of a pure alpha sort"
in Windows XP. That required a registry setting to change
(back). Now here's this stupid "show in groups" default that has
to be changed on a per-folder basis because there's absolutely
NO way to do it globally. STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT!!!

Five months later and there's still no fix for this? What a bunch
of maroons. It's especially aggravating for me because I copy my
whole Outlook.pst from my desktop (running Outlok 2002) to my
notebook every time I travel, and have to go back and manually
reset each folder every time. Bah!

Also, my guess is that favorites are favored by mousers. I use
keyboard shortcuts whenever they're available, so I go quickly to
any folder I want by typing the first letter. This takes a little
creativity in naming folders, but works very well.

 

[Brian Tillman]

Five months later and there's still no fix for this?

Last week, someone posted a method of globally modifying the View for all
folders. I imagine it would apply in your case, too.