Conversation Piece: Outlook 2010 on Windows 7
I’ve been testing Office 2010 for many months, and now that it’s out in public beta, I’m using it exclusively on my main workstation. My favorite of the new Office applications is Outlook; it’s the one with the most dramatic changes, and one of those is the default “Conversation” view of your email messages.
Outlook 2007 also had a “Conversation” view but it was turned off by default, and it was less sophisticated. You had to choose to display by Date or by Conversation; in 2010 it’s a combined Date/Conversation view.
The “Conversation” arrangement means related messages are grouped together in your Inbox (you can also move a group or an individual message to another folder, either manually or by using rules). At first, I wasn’t sure I liked this, but now that I’ve gotten used to it, I really appreciate the convenience of having the whole conversation thread together. When a new message in a thread comes in, the first one is moved from its chronological place in the Inbox down to the group, which now appears chronologically where the most recent message in the thread came in.
By default, a conversation is indicated by a small arrow that appears to the left of the subject line, as shown below in the conversation titled “Hello” that’s highlighted in yellow:
The names of senders are listed below the subject line. When you click the subject line, you expand the conversation thread to display the individual messages, as shown above in the conversation titled “bobble” that’s encircled in red.
If you don’t like the conversation view, you have several options. Right click “Arrange By: Date (Conversations)” at the top of the mailbox list and select Conversations, as shown below:
Here you can uncheck “Show Messages in Conversations,” or you can choose whether to show messages from other folders in a thread, whether to show the senders’ names above the subject line, select to always expand conversations, or just use the classic indented view.
If you do choose to keep the Conversation view, you might want to always expand the conversations. When I first started using 2010, I missed several new messages because they were buried inside conversation threads. The subject line will be bolded if there are any new messages in it, but sometimes messages end up in threads unexpectedly. For instance, if two different people send you messages with the identical subject line (this often happens with something generic such as “Checking in” or “Hello”), Outlook puts these in the same thread even though the messages really aren’t related to one another.
This could cause some consternation, making it appear that people have been cc’ed on a message when they haven’t, as described in this article.
Even though it’s not perfect, I have come to like the Conversation view in Outlook 2010, and I’m hoping it will be even better by the time we get to the final release version of the software. It’s just one of many features that makes 2010 the best Outlook yet.
- Debra Littlejohn Shinder, MVP
deb@shinder.net www.debshinder.com
Barbu Mateescu on December 29, 2009 at 11:51 PM
Much like the author, I found the Win7+Office2010 as a combination that's better in almost any possible way.
But... Of course, there had to be a "but". My Windows Phone doesn't sync anymore w/ Outlook; it did with the previous version. Of course, I'm tempted to say that it's OK, Office being a beta version; but that doesn't help neither the sync or the bitter taste left in my mind.
r4 dsi on December 29, 2009 at 11:57 PM
Well i liked reading this post and even it is enhanced with Jump List. The last little enhancement comes with Windows 7, and the Jump Lists feature. Right clicking on the Outlook icon on the task bar brings up this menu, which makes it really easy to get started on something.
Oliver on December 30, 2009 at 06:38 AM
I really like it that I can ignore conversations. Some of my friends are very eager to write e-mails when planning our next weekend. When I am not available or out of town all I need is one click and my inbox is clearer. What I don't like, the search is still not able to search huge amounts of data in a very short time, and the results shown are not the right one. So I will keep my search tool lookeen (not that I would have abandoned it, you only have to pay once for it, but it is sad for all the other Outlook users who have been waiting for new improvements.)
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