Outlook’s New Spaces Feature Revealed, Lets You Organize Your Projects Better

Microsoft is working on a new feature for Outlook on the web. The company’s newest feature for Outlook, simply called Spaces, is a new way of helping users better organize their projects.

Outlook Spaces brings together the best of Office into a simple space/board that makes it much easier to keep track of emails, files, deadlines, to-do lists, etc.

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The new experience is still very much under construction, as it has not been officially announced by Microsoft yet. The feature was first spotted by WalkingCat, giving us an early look at what the feature is supposed to be. “Spaces helps you organize your emails, meetings, and docs into easy-to-follow project spaces. Forget worrying about dropping the ball; Spaces helps you stay effortlessly on top of what matters,” the official description for Outlook Spaces states. 

Outlook Spaces essentially gives you a place where you can put together the important things for your project. It will automatically search your account with the keywords provided during setup for relevant emails and documents, which you can drag into your project space for future reference.

Right now, you can put things like emails, tasks lists, OneDrive files, links, weather, sticky notes, and deadlines on your Spaces. In the future, Microsoft will let you add Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents.

Here’s an early look at Outlook Spaces:

Outlook Spaces does actually look very useful. At the moment, though, it’s not clear exactly when Microsoft will be making the feature available to everyone. It also seems like the feature will only be limited to those with Office 365 accounts, as I was only able to use it with my Office 365 account for my university, and it wouldn’t work with my personal Outlook account. But that could change in the future, considering the fact that Microsoft hasn’t actually made this feature official yet.


Enabling Outlook Spaces

If you want to use Outlook Spaces right now, WalkingCat found a way to enable it a little early. You simply have to open up outlook.office.com/spaces and go into the developer tools on your browser (press F12). From there, go to the Console tab on the developer tools, copy and paste the following code into the console, and hit enter:

localStorage.setItem("featureOverrides", "outlookSpaces-enabled")

After that, refresh your browser and you’ll be allowed to get started with Outlook Spaces by creating your first project:

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Conversation 25 comments

  • IanYates82

    Premium Member
    16 February, 2020 - 6:51 am

    <p>Nice. I'll give this a try. Linking in with planner and a terms channel would be handy too perhaps</p>

  • bgoodbody

    Premium Member
    16 February, 2020 - 10:10 am

    <p>Only works with Work or school account</p>

    • simard57

      16 February, 2020 - 11:15 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#520999">In reply to bgoodbody:</a></em></blockquote><p>I suppose it is a premium service – that does suck because I could see this as useful.</p>

      • branpurn

        18 February, 2020 - 12:13 pm

        <blockquote><em><a href="#521012">In reply to Simard57:</a></em></blockquote><p> </p><p>Especially as a paid subscriber to Office 365 (non-enterprise)…</p>

  • Chris_Kez

    Premium Member
    16 February, 2020 - 11:26 am

    <p>This is one of the use cases they laid out for Sets a year or two ago- group together related tabs from across different applications. Spaces seems like a more straightforward expression of this idea.</p>

  • jimchamplin

    Premium Member
    16 February, 2020 - 12:16 pm

    <p>…</p><p><br></p><p>… Hello Dashboard. We thought Apple killed you and that you were gone forever! :D</p>

  • ken_kelly

    16 February, 2020 - 1:37 pm

    <p>Great tip, thanks WalkingCat and Thurrott</p>

  • ubelhorj

    Premium Member
    16 February, 2020 - 1:57 pm

    <p>I just logged into my work account and enabled it. Seems like it found most of the stuff related to the project I entered. I'm started a new project in the next week or two. I'll give this a try and see what happens.</p><p><br></p><p>Seems like a nice way to mentally separate all the planning and communication from different projects. </p>

  • scovious

    16 February, 2020 - 2:39 pm

    <p>This seems like it would be well suited to OneNote and Mixed Reality</p>

    • Paul Thurrott

      Premium Member
      17 February, 2020 - 7:31 am

      OneNote and Mixed Reality. 🙂 Microsoft’s next growth market.

  • ianceicys

    Premium Member
    16 February, 2020 - 3:47 pm

    <p>Worked for me! Thanks for the awesome tip!</p>

  • thejoefin

    Premium Member
    16 February, 2020 - 11:25 pm

    <p>This is great! I love that Microsoft is still working on new ideas and new way to innovate on productivity. Maybe this tool sticks around, maybe not, either way it is good for Microsoft to try different and new things.</p>

  • rm

    17 February, 2020 - 8:39 am

    <p>Shouldn't this be added into Teams?</p>

    • jchampeau

      Premium Member
      17 February, 2020 - 9:49 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#521143">In reply to RM:</a></em></blockquote><p>Teams is for, um, teams, while this looks to be specifically for individual use.</p>

  • joegasper

    17 February, 2020 - 11:05 am

    <p>What does the SharePoint team think – it has SharePoint Spaces already?</p><p>www.exploresharepointspaces.com</p>

    • behindmyscreen

      17 February, 2020 - 10:30 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#521180">In reply to joegasper:</a></em></blockquote><p>They don’t look related </p>

      • joegasper

        18 February, 2020 - 8:47 pm

        <blockquote><em><a href="#521360">In reply to behindmyscreen:</a></em></blockquote><p>Clearly they aren't – it's just the branding to Office 365 services as "Spaces".</p>

  • bpech

    Premium Member
    17 February, 2020 - 2:48 pm

    <p>Seems like Microsoft's answer for Trello….</p>

  • overseer

    17 February, 2020 - 3:59 pm

    <p>Wonder if this could be used to keep track of authentication cert renewals….</p>

  • Jim Lewis

    17 February, 2020 - 5:45 pm

    <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Thanks! Works for me and I am only an Office 365 Business Essentials subscriber ($60/year) (but also O365 Home subscriber). Just doing it based on WalkingCat's tweet, I also found the following link helpful on DevTools, LocalStorage: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/devtools-guide-chromium/storage/localstorage (can't use actual link in post so anyone else edit accordingly with h t t p s : / / in front)</span></p>

  • solomonrex

    18 February, 2020 - 9:59 am

    <p>This is such an obvious OS-level feature, but I can't deny that o365 is where it belongs, fundamentally. I don't like the Outlook branding – probably because of years of IT shop meddling with Outlook and its abominable sprawl.</p><p><br></p><p>But even so, I can't be the only one with bad connotations, and isn't Project a better brand? And isn't the point of Teams to organize content and communication around projects already?</p>

    • behindmyscreen

      19 February, 2020 - 6:48 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#521486">In reply to solomonrex:</a></em></blockquote><p>Being in O365 means its available on all platforms which is fantastic! between Teams and Outlook 365 being great I can move to Linux on my work machine without any heroics to stay connected at work.</p>

    • Narg

      25 November, 2020 - 10:46 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#521486">In reply to solomonrex:</a></em></blockquote><p>You don't seem to understand "Cloud Computing" thinking it's an OS-level feature…</p>

  • sportflier

    18 February, 2020 - 11:34 am

    <p>It looks like Sticky Notes on steroids.</p>

  • behindmyscreen

    19 February, 2020 - 6:46 pm

    <p>I think I will need to employ this on my next project to see how it will work out. I think the metaphor is a project workbench.</p><p><br></p><p>*EDIT*: looks like they fixed that bug</p>

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