The outliner changed in the latest 2.81 providing now the ability to rearrange elements more easily and with a better relation with selections happening in the outliner and the viewport.
That said, I find it still extremely hard to find an object in the outliner after selecting it in the viewport.
If I have many collections and I select something in the viewport, the outliner shows no sign of what collection this object is part of.
Any improvement planned?
I am using 2.82 and when I select an object I can clearly see which collection it belongs to in the outliner.
Set mouse pointer hover outliner and press “.” key.
Full-stop punctuation mark is the key to center outliner view on active object name.
By seeing active object in outliner, you should see in View Layers view to which collection it belongs.
An object can be in several collections. Disable first collection it appears in and press “.” again to verify it was the only one.
But you have to set Outliner view to View Layers to see relations between objects and collections.
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Alright, I can now see what collection the selected object is part of.
Here’s what happened: in the theme I’m using when the object is selected the color that indicates the selection near the collection is subtle. But what threw me off is that I was expecting the collection to become highlighted not the icon next to it, so basically I never looked at the icons but just the collection.
That said, thanks @zeauro for the tip: I didn’t know about the ‘.’ shortcut and it’s very handy. I’ll use that a lot 
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