Clearing Up Outlook Task View Issues

March 9, 2015

In the Windows desktop copy of Outlook, occasionally the task views can get corrupted and clicking the normal Reset Current View button will not clear up the problem. The typical scenario for MYN users is finding that the custom settings made to the To-Do Bar task list do not stick; no matter how many times you put in the MYN settings, they just disappear. In the middle of Lesson (Chapter) 3 of the Outlook book, Edition 4, I give some easy solutions for that. But every so often they don’t do the full job. Even reinstalling Outlook may not fix the issue (as the corruptions get stored in the server or PST you reconnect to after reinstall).

If you run into this problem, here is a simple, but somewhat drastic, solution. It’s a command line Windows OS operation that completely resets the views in Outlook. I call this drastic because it resets ALL views in Outlook to their default settings; so any customizations to any other views you made, say to an e-mail or Calendar view, also get reset. Also, any custom views you create from scratch will be deleted.

But this may be your only solution. A recent reader had the problem above in his copy of Outlook and tried everything including reinstall, but to no avail. He then used the command below and it fixed the corruption issue (thanks to Stew for bringing this to my attention).

It’s called the cleanviews command, and it is part of a full set of Outlook command line tools that is written up here:  http://www.howto-outlook.com/howto/commandlineswitches.htm

Following instructions there, use the switch /cleanviews. In other words, in step 3 at that page, use the command:   outlook.exe /cleanviews    (note the single space before the / and no space after).

That should fix the problem I described above. Of course, use of any of the commands at that page should be done with caution as they make fairly major changes to Outlook.

Michael

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