The Tags feature in Microsoft 365 is going away

This is something that, to be honest, I didn’t know existed. If you go to the office.com site and look at the Microsoft 365 home page, you had the ability to tag content for easy retrieval. Here’s what’s going on…

Here is the notice from Microsoft regarding the retirement of the Tags feature:

We will retire the Tags feature from the Microsoft 365 app, which affects www.microsoft365.com and www.office.com, as well as the Windows app for Microsoft 365 (Office).

Before the retirement, users can access the Tags feature from the Home page of the Microsoft 365 app under the Quick access section and on the My content page.

The retirement will start January 6, 2025, and end by January 10, 2025. After the Tags feature is retired from Microsoft 365 apps, users will not be able to view existing tags or apply new tags.

I had to go out and find where the tag feature was… I clicked on the ellipsis for a file in the Quick access area, selected Tag, and assigned a tag to the document. I could also create a new Quick Access button to show me all the content that used that particular tag:

Based on the Microsoft announcement, there’s not much time before tags just flat out won’t work any longer. Furthermore, you won’t be able to see items assigned a particular tag. The tagging is just… gone.

What they recommend is that you use the Favorites feature to mark a file as a favorite:

You can then use the Favorites button to see all the content that you’ve flagged as a favorite:

As I mentioned, I wasn’t aware that tags existed in this context, and I don’t’ know that many others did also. If you are using tags, you have a couple of weeks to go out and flag each of your tagged items as favorites. Granted, you have no level of categorization under Favorites… it’s just a single dumping ground. But at least you won’t lose the ability to find a document without combing through everything that you have…