The main organizational feature in Outlook 2003 is called an arrangement, which Microsoft describes as a predefined combination of grouped and sorted messages in a table view. By default, Outlook 2003 is configured to use the Date arrangement to view messages in the Inbox and any personal folders you create. However, the Date arrangement is only one of 13 predefined arrangements you can use to organize your email messages. Of the various options, the Date and the Conversation arrangements are probably the most useful for most people. Let’s take a closer look at these two arrangements.

As its name implies, the Date arrangement is designed to group email messages by date, thus making it very easy to keep track of when you received each message. Outlook adds a set of collapsible date-related group headings to the list of email messages in your inbox and then organizes the messages under these headings accordingly. Typical headings in the Date arrangement layout are Today, Yesterday, Last Week, Two Weeks Ago, Earlier This Month, Last Month, and Older. Within each of these groups, Outlook simplifies the display by removing unnecessary column headings and sorting the messages by date and time.

The Conversation arrangement makes it easy to track a series of messages from various participants on the same topic over the course of time. In this arrangement, which is also known as a message thread, Outlook creates group headings based on the subject field and then organizes all the messages in the group according to who replied to whom, as well as the date and time.

To change the arrangement, open the View menu and point to Arrange By. Click any of the arrangement options and Outlook immediately changes the order in which your email messages appear.