Configuring Microsoft Outlook 365 to work better with your Windows screen reader

By Tara, 25 March, 2024

Forum
Windows

Hello,
When you first open Outlook 365 after installation, messages within folders are by default grouped by day or week. This might slow down your productivity, it has done for me. Here's how to fix this.
1. Go to the view menu by pressing Alt and arrowing right to find it.
2. Tab until you find 'arrangement', then press Space.
3. Arrow down until you find the 'show in groups' checkbox and uncheck it.
Then you're done. You don't even need to press OK or Apply or anything like that. This seems a bit too easy in retrospect, I installed Outlook 365 on my new machine a couple of months back. I just tried choosing to sort my messages into groups with this method which is the default, then put it back to normal again, or at least, my definition of normal. I can't remember if there's something else I did to get this working. If it still doesn't sort the problem out, let me know and I'll have another mess around. There are different options for views like change view or change current view or something. I can't remember if I went in there to do stuff or not. I heard Outlook 365 was brought up on a podcast a few months ago, and the difficulty of navigating through messages was mentioned. Hope this helps people.

Options

Comments

By SeasonKing on Wednesday, March 27, 2024 - 17:50

Turn off the reading pane in that view menu. This way, outlook isn't scrambling to show each message on the side while you are arrowing down that message list. Saves up lot of processing power in my opinion. If you wanna read the message, don't use reading pane, use the actual message viewer which appears when you press enter or shift+enter on a message.
For sighted people obviously reading pane may be prefered.

By Tara on Wednesday, March 27, 2024 - 17:50

Hi SeasonKing,
I actually can't find that reading pane thing now. I think I remember it when I first installed Outlook 365. I definitely turned it off though! Maybe it was in a previous version. I've looked under the advanced view settings, and I can't find it there either. I did however find something called 'immersive reader view' or something. That is turned off though. Thanks for the tip though.