Outlook 2013 Folder Pane

You didn't include the attachment, but I believe you want to go to the View Tab, View Settings, and set Group By to none.

Sorry about the attachment. I thought it had uploaded, but I added it now.

Thanks for the input, but that setting was already set to None. . .

Please see this Microsoft support article for Outlook.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Command-line-switches-for-Microsoft-Office-products-079164cd-4ef5-4178-b235-441737deb3a6?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US#ID0EAABAAA=Outlook

You may need to click on the Outlook heading.

Run Outllook /cleanviews

Now in Outlook, View tab, Advanced View Settings, click on Sort Ascending (or your choice).

That doesn't appear to be a view. It looks like they are actual folders. Is there messages in them that you don't see when looking in the inbox?

John Hurst, thank you, but I don't understand which heading, what cleanviews is, or what to do with the link and the command line switches. My email is already sorted.

Brian B, they seem to be shortcuts to the actual emails. I can click on a year and find all the messages from that year, but the messages are also in the Inbox. I suppose this is supposed to make it easier to find messages, but I don't like seeing that list of folders in the pane, and it makes it more time-consuming to click on a folder. I wouldn't mind if I could leave the years there in a collapsed format, but that doesn't seem to be an option. I'm afraid to delete them because that may delete the email as well!

You may need to make a new folder structure and moves years into them . Do not Delete Outlook folders as this will delete email

John Hurst, how do I create a new folder structure??

Outlook, Right click in a blank area of the folder tree area and select New Folder. Name it and then you can move other folders into it

I hope this helps

That's too complicated for me. I know how to create new folders, but moving others into it sounds too daunting. Unless I just don't understand what you mean, I think I'd end up with sub-folders, and it would be worse than what I have now! I'm hoping for another solution. If not, I'll just leave things as is. So far everything with doing this has been a struggle from not being able to export my Thunderbird email without buying a program to convert them, to saving my address book to a .csv file that's formatted to how Outlook wants it, to importing the file to Outlook contacts, to now trying to get those contacts into the Outlook address book. So trying to create a new folder structure is just not going to happen, but thanks anyway.

If you do not want Outlook sub folders, then just use the structure you have but then you do need to scroll through them

I never had all the yearly folders in the past, so I think there must be a way to collapse or hide them, but I don't know how. Maybe I'll figure it out or sooner or later someone will suggest a solution. I'm aware that without a fix I'll have to scroll through them. That's what I started out saying!

They must have been created somehow as Outlook does not do this on its own

You can manually arrange your folder list. but be careful because manually created folder arrangements can be resorted by Outlook.

No other suggestions were helpful, so I found a workaround.