How to Collapse & Expand Emails Group in Outlook? [Explanation + Shortcut]

Collapse & Expend Emails groups in Outlook helps you to select a set of emails that you have already sorted.

This feature can be a real timesaver, especially if you receive a lot of emails, work with documents containing lists of emails, or deal with emails that can easily be broken up into different logical groups.

Grouping your emails in the folder is simple, finding a specific email group is quite difficult all the emails are arranged in a group but scattered.

There comes the role of the Collapse & Expend option: In this article, you will learn ‘How to Collapse & Expend Emails Group in Outlook’?

How to Collapse or Expand all Groups in Outlook?

Most of the users would like to keep all the messages collapsed for a clean view in Outlook, by default, Outlook Folder is arranged according to the date, the latest email received would be on the top and the older one on the bottom.

That way the email inflow is arranged, and you can filter or sort emails according to the requirement, like Subject, From, size, attachment, and many more.

The arrangement is reversed easily with a click:

Of that, if your inbox is filled with numerous emails with multiple addresses, it is very difficult to scroll down and down to understand.

You made the groups but still, to get another group you need to scroll down, Outlook Collapse feature tries to bring your group on the screen in a single click.

Let’s dive in and understand how it works:

Step 1: Open Outlook.

Step 2: If you want to collapse or expand a single group per time, you need to select this group and then click View

Step 3: Click Expand/Collapse from the arrangement section.

Step 4: You will get four options:

  1. Collapse this group
  2. Expand this group
  3. Collapse all groups
  4. Expand all groups
  • Collapse this group – These options subside all available emails in that group with a single click. you can only see the name of the group such as (day: Today, yesterday, etc). Click on any emails available on that group and click collapse this group, the group subside automatically.
  • Expand this group – This is the reversal of Collapse this group, you can enlarge the group and all the emails available in that group are visible. Under this, you can select the group which is already in collapsed form and click expand this group. You can also click on the forward arrow to open the group.
  • Collapse all groups – In this option, you can easily subside all available groups with a single click. All the available emails in the group are invisible, only the group name is shown.
  • Expand all groups – Similar to above you can enlarge all the above groups which are collapsed. Click on Expand all group and all the emails are enlarged and your inbox becomes normal.

Collapse Or Expand All Groups Using Advance View Setting

There is another method to Collapse and Expand All Groups in Outlook.

Open Outlook >> Click View Tab >> View Setting

Collapse Or Expand All Groups Using Advance View Setting

Customized View Dialog box popping up, in that dialog, click Group By:

If you want to open Outlook with all groups expanded by default, please select All Expanded in the Group By dialog under Expand/collapse defaults. If not, select All Collapsed.

Keyboard Shortcut – Alt + V +V + Down arrow + Enter + Tab + Down arrow

Keyboard Shortcut to Expand and Collapse in Outlook

The user can easily Expand and Collapse in Outlook using Keyboard Shortcut:

  • Collapse this group – Alt + V + E + C
  • Expand this group – Alt + V + E + E
  • Collapse all groups – Alt + V + E + G
  • Expand all groups – Alt + V + E + X

Another Keyboard Shortcut to Expanding and Collapsing Group:

  1. Hold Ctrl Key and Press + Sign for expanding all groups.
  2. Hold Ctrl Key and Press – Sign for Collapsing all groups.

Wrap Up

Expand and Collapse in Outlook features are really extremely helpful for those users who are dealing with the bulk of email messages.

In case your inbox is collapse mode, any new email message that arrived will not be visible, you are unable to find out until you expand the group about the new mail.

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Amit Bansal

My Name is Amit Bansal, and I am the founder of "Mail Smartly", With a track record of penning in-depth blogs and producing informative YouTube videos, for a deeper dive into solutions and tutorials, visit my YouTube Channel

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