Trouble sorting files by filename in Outlook.

March 14, 2008 2:13 PM

I'm having trouble sorting (or rather, unsorting) files in Outlook.

I have thousands of .msg e-mail files in a folder, and they are carefully ordered by filename - Email100.msg, Email101.msg, Email102.msg, etc. The information in these emails needs to be put into an Excel spreadsheet, and so I've been using Outlook to do the exporting of the e-mail contents. Yesterday I was doing this, and it was no hassle - just drag and drop the files into an Outlook folder, and they're listed in order (Email100.msg first, then Email101.msg second). Then export to Excel and again, everything's in order. Cool.

But today I start up my computer and Outlook seems to have gone bonkers with the sorting. No matter what I do, when I drag and drop the files into the Outlook folder, it lists them according to the date received, NOT according to the order of the files. This occurs even when I explicitly tell Outlook to not arrange by date received. Currently all settings are on "Arrange By: (none)", and it's still doing it. It's like the program is just ignoring me. And there seems to be no explicit way in Outlook to sort by the filename, so that's out. Am I doing something wrong? This is with Outlook 2003.

posted by naju to computers & internet (5 comments total)

What type of folder is this? Is this a folder that you can navigate to outside of outlook, through My Computer, for example? If so, then it is probably the folder's sorting options and not Outlook's sorting options.
posted by slavlin at 2:22 PM on March 14, 2008

It is a folder you can navigate to through My Computer. The folder is sorted by filename, so I don't think that is the problem. Unless there are sorting options beyond that?
posted by naju at 2:40 PM on March 14, 2008

Try this: Customize Current View > Fields > Date / Time Fields > add the Modified field and then sort by it.

Assuming the files were originally created in the same order in which they're named, this may do the trick. The filename is nowhere to be found within the MSG file, so I'm guessing it's not a field property by which you can sort.
posted by lordaych at 10:13 PM on March 14, 2008

This may be really basic, but you can sort by a column if you click the header at the top of the column.

You might have accidentally clicked some random header like "Size." If so, try clicking the Filename header and see if it puts things back in place.
posted by quinoa at 10:07 AM on March 15, 2008

Thanks for the responses. The "Modified" field is a good idea and could be useful in the future. I still couldn't figure out how to solve my particular problem with Outlook, but for those who might be similarly stuck, a program I found called EmailExplorerPro allowed me to sort by filename, then export to Excel.
posted by naju at 2:59 PM on March 15, 2008