New Outlook doesn't unhide your taskbar - two quick fixes

I quite like the new Outlook for Windows. But it has a couple of annoying bugs. One of which is, when it is maximised it doesn't let you unhide your bottom task bar.

I've set up Windows so the taskbar disappears whenever my cursor isn't at the bottom of the screen. When my mouse touches the bottom, the bar appears. Lovely! But Outlook breaks this functionality - which I'm pretty sure existed back in Windows 95.

Microsoft have received several complaints about this⁰, but done nothing.

Anyway, here's two way you can fix it. Neither are particularly good, but they do work.

Don't maximise

Rather than pressing the big square icon in the top right of the window, just drag the edges of your window to be as big as possible.

This is a stupid fix. Your window is now the same size as your screen but technically isn't maximised. So the taskbar doesn't get stuck behind Outlook.

Use an external screen

This problem only occurs on my laptop's screen. So I plugged in an external monitor and moved the Outlook window to there.

When maximised, Outlook doesn't prevent the taskbar from appearing.

What causes this problem

I'm pretty sure the New Outlook uses "fullscreen" rather than "maximise". That mode is often used for things like games where you don't want a taskbar suddenly appearing.

But the root cause is Microsoft's decision to ignore customer feedback. Look, bugs happen. That's just a fact of life. But absolutely no-one from the MS team is looking at customer complaints. Being "feature-driven" is great - but you need to close the loop to see if those features are working for customers.