BlogOffice

The Case of the Missing Outlook Column

This morning I sat down as usual and started to answer email. I switched back and forth between a couple of programs, looking something up, and then I clicked back to Outlook and sorted my mail by From (you know how to do that, right? Just click in the From column heading to arrange the messages alphabetically by sender). When I went to click the Received column heading (to put the messages back in order by date), the column was gone! No kidding. Gone. At first I thought some weird power surge has expanded the Size column--suddenly it was 72 characters wide. But no, there was no Received column to be found. That meant I had no way of getting to the messages I'd received today except by paging through my Inbox, looking for unopened messages.

[Note: This makes a good argument for keeping your Inbox cleaned out. If you file or delete everything you read, you won't have 200 messages sitting in your Inbox taking up space like I do.]

I still don't know why the column disappeared, but I figured out how to fix it. Right-click in the column heading row (I clicked to the right of the Subject heading) and choose Field Chooser from the context menu. When the Field Chooser palette appears, drag the missing field (in my case, Received) from the Chooser list to Outlook's column heading area. The column is back, safe and sound, and you can arrange your messages in whatever way pleases you most. If you need to rearrange the columns, you can simply drag the column heading wherever you want it on the line. And to resize that inflated Size column, simply drag the column divider in the heading bar inward to condense the space.

Hey, I don't mind a little mystery, as long as I can find my way around it. :) k