Forum Discussion
Group by Category disappeared
I have been flagging emails in Outlook and adding a Category with the name of someone who is responsible to deal with the content of that email. This gets automatically added to To Do and when I move it from my flagged email list to a proper list, I have been able to group all of these email tasks by Category. It's been working great and my team can see their own tasks easily by grouping by Category. For some reason, this option disappeared yesterday and I can't find it anywhere. Does anyone know how I can get the Group By Categories option back or where else I should look for it?
Group by Category in ToDo does not work at all or creates a blank screen. This must be fixed. In the meantime I will share my workaround.
First the problem description:
- I use outlook.office.com ToDo on an Edge browser on a Win11 Microsoft NUC. (same problem with Chrome, have not tried FFox).
- Select "All" tasks.
- Click "Group" then Group by "Categories".
- But it groups by the "Left Panel" groups, not my custom groups (Note 68 Flagged emails in both):
5. Then clicking anything the screen goes blank.
My workaround is to go to Outlook desktop Calendar. Click "View" then "To-Do bar" then "Tasks". That allows me to "Arrnage by Categories". Clunky but it works for me.
- I wish categories would be global to your profile rather than Silo'd in each app. I've mostly abandoned them and just rely on hash tags like #BlahBlah which do filter really nicely in todo just by clicking
New Outlook is being pushed out in our organisation which is fine...
IF "Group by Category was not missing. I and several colleagues use it actively in our daily work. When will it be activated in the new version? Does anyone know?- Not having and being able to sort by category is a deal breaker for me. I will roll-back or find an alternative to do app. Please re-instate this feature.
Andrew0987 I was equally as shocked and frustrated and then worked out how to create separate "To Do" lists by category (see my earlier post). I prefer it even as the "To Do" app on the iphone is so good. Solved it for me but not universally accepted here for some reason. Depends on your habbits I suppose.
I had the same frustration but then I noticed the "To Do" app is more advanced so it doesn't need to sort by category. You can create new lists on the left. I simply created lists for various categories that I had before (Home Jobs, Goals, Shopping etc) and then organised the tasks into these lists with a drag and drop. Works beautifully in my opinion. Easy to access on the iphone app also. I simply change to another list to see a summary of tasks in that list.
DavidJackson335 I'm sure that works for many people. In my case, I'd like to automate the process more than that. It would be ideal if you could just flag an email in Outlook when you get it and have it automatically show up on a ToDo list that is shared with your team. Since you have to move messages in ToDo from the flagged email area to an actual list, your idea is not a lot more effort. I really didn't want to go into ToDo at all in order to add tasks to the ToDo list. Also, being able to categorize is more flexible since you don't have to open multiple folders and can see everything at once whenever you want to.
I ended up not using ToDo since it doesn't really do what I was hoping it would.
- I can get "group by category" to work in Firefox but not Chrome.
- Have you cleared the cache in Chrome and checked to make sure you have the current version of Chrome?
- The Group By Categories is now back for me (finally!). It wasn't there a few hours ago...
- The group by categories is back! Or so I can see in my firefox browser in an Ubuntu OS. I hope it works for the rest of you too
I just had a reply from Microsoft on a support ticket I opened on this subject.
Thank you for letting us know about this. Our apologies for the trouble.
We got an update from the team, the 'Group by Categories' feature is still in testing period, once we roll out to 100%, the issue would resolve automatically.
We will roll out the feature post 1 week to all users. Thanks for bearing with us.Best regards,
Zeeshan- Thank you for creating a support ticket about this and sharing the response from Microsoft. What's really annoying about this is that they took away functionality that people were using and rely on to help them do their work.
- I've created a request for Microsoft to add Group by Category back to To Do. Maybe everyone can add some votes and comments? Here is the link: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/33bdd7a0-6905-ee11-a81c-000d3ae5b6f4
