Flag Status Locked in Outlook 2007

11th August 2007

For some reason I decided that today was a good day to install my Office 2007, which I have had since February. My primary reason for doing so were some of the good things I’ve seen and heard about Excel 2007.

Immediately upon opening Outlook, the first thing I noticed was that my Flag Status column had moved from the left side, where they were highly visible, all the way to the end of the toolbar on the right.

In any given day, I get over 200 emails into my Outlook In Box. I have been meticulous about using the “Flag status” to colorize and prioritize things I need to do, so I went in to try to rearrange the order.

Despite my choosing to display the flag status column first with the field chooser, the flag status icon remains unmovable and locked in place way over on the far right hand side.

Attempting to drag the icon from one area of the toolbar to another is unsuccessful, you can drag every other column around, and organize them however you like, but any attempt to place columns behind this one, don’t work either.

If you’re going to offer organization in the field chooser, then why wouldn’t it work? Well it looked like a bug to me, so I immediately went to Google, an attempted to find a solution.

I did find plenty of people complaining about this, and finally I found the Microsoft page, with specific instructions how to move the flag status column. This is what it says, but it does not work:

Move the Flag Status column

1. In the main Outlook window, on the View menu, point to Current View, and then click Customize Current View.
2. In the Show these fields in this order list, select Flag Status, and then click Move Up or Move Down until Flag Status is in the position that you want.

So now 30 seconds of using Office 2007, I absolutely hate it because of a stupid bug that nobody seemed to notice before they released it.

Maybe what happened Was that one developer noticed the problem and said another developer the e-mail, who immediately flagged it because it was so important he wanted to be sure he didn’t forget.

However, since the flag appears way over on the right side of his screen he didn’t notice it before release day, so the rest of us are played until Microsoft releases an Office 2007 service pack. Thanks Microsoft.