Applying views to all folders

No, there is no need to do that. In Outlook you can define view templates for this. Depending on your version of Outlook you can either access this via;

View-> Arrange By-> Current View-> Define Views…
or via;
View-> Current View-> Define Views…

By default all folders and newly created folders are in the “Messages” view (except for the Sent Items folder which is in the “Sent To” view). If you make changes to this view it will automatically also apply these changes to all the folders that are still in the default “Messages” view.

It might be that you’ve already modified the view for some individual folders. This could be even somthing simple as modifying the column size. In these cases you will find that changes to the default “Messages” view will not apply to these folders. To prevent this from happening you can force a reset on all the folders by starting Outlook with the /cleanviews switch;

Start-> Run; outlook.exe /cleanviews
(you can also start the Run command by pressing the Windows logo key + R on your keyboard)

This will reset all defined views back to default, clears custom views and will apply the default views to all folders (Inbox, subfolders, Sent Items, Contacts, Calendar, Notes, Tasks and Journal).

If you have many custom views already which you want to keep, you probably don’t want to do this. In this case you can define a new view and simply apply that view on first use of a folder. This is less cumbersome than defining the view per folder.

Extra tip;
When you enable the “Advanced Toolbar” via View-> Toolbars-> Advanced you can very quickly (2 clicks) change a view on a folder.