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Office 2010 Tips – Outlook Conversation Views

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Outlook Conversation View: Make it Work for You

The new Conversation View in Outlook 2010 is one of my favorite new capabilities; but how can you get the most out of it? Conversation View is designed to connect relevant information on a topic, allowing you to track email threads without diving into your inbox or other folders to find that elusive first message.

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Step by Step:

Use Conversation View to cut down on the volume of emails you view in your inbox. 

Instead of seeing 5 emails stacked on top of one another, and more piling in from different senders on the same topic, Conversation view groups all of those emails together under one heading.

Click to read each email, or simply read through the entire chain from the most recent email using the Reading Pane.

Still not feeling it? To turn off Conversation View:

1. Go up to the Ribbon and choose “View”

2. Click on a different icon to change the view

Outlook 2010 defaults to Conversation view for every folder you create, but the click path to change the setting is the same in each folder.

View by Conversation

View by Date

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Another really great capability of conversation view is the ability to streamline and focus the content in your inbox. You can leverage the new Ignore and Clean Up capabilities to reduce the amount of clutter in your inbox.

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Step by Step:

Ignore a Conversation

  • Highlight and conversation in your inbox that you have been included in but are not concerned with
  • Click Ignore on the Ribbon to delete existing messages and any future ones related to this conversation.

Clean up Conversation

  • Highlight a conversation with a large number of replies and related messages.
  • Click “Clean Up” on the ribbon to have Outlook automatically delete redundant replies and remove the clutter from your inbox. 

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    My pleasure Andrew... I hope you find this to be a useful capability.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    On initial use I think I like the look of the Conversation view as well. I have to admit I regressed and did not have time to acclimate myself to the new layout. I think I will try and remember to give it another go around today and  see if it sticks. Thanks Patrickr!

  • Anonymous
    September 28, 2010
    I am having problems with this view. I like it but the issue is with conversations that are not really related being lumped together. For example I have several emails from the past few months with the subject of "lunch". These are invites to lunch from different people but not at all related to the same event. I also have a similar issue with email with no subject at all. How do you fix this and without it causing issues in the conversation view.

  • Anonymous
    November 16, 2010
    When I delete a message, I don't want cleanup all messages in the conversation.  How can I turn that off?

  • Anonymous
    January 18, 2012
    Hi -- I used to use a function in Outlook at a previous company where all e-mails in a conversation were highlighted (but not grouped).  I now can't find that option... does it still exist?

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    December 10, 2015
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