How to hide or move the followup flag column in Outlook 2003

Outlook flagsI’m sure in older versions of Outlook, the Followup Flag was somewhere on the left hand side, and that’s still where I’m used to seeing it. But in Outlook 2003, it’s on the right, and apparently can’t be moved. Unlike the other columns, it’s not draggable, and if you go into the dialog box that sorts the columns, no matter where you think you’ve moved it, it stays put on the right hand side.

It turns out you have to employ some special trickery to move it. In the Other Settings, there is an option called Quick Flags. This needs to be turned off to hide or move the column.

The down side is, Quick Flags does nifty things, with a left-click alternating between setting a red flag, and ticking off (to show a task is completed). It also provides a special right-click menu that allows quick access to the flags (hence the name), instead of via the main right-click menu via the Followup option. MS, in their wisdom, made all this only work when the Flags are in the rightmost column. Weird.