From the course: Outlook 2016 Essential Training
Customizing the inbox
- Outlook has some great options for customizing the way you read your mail to make it work exactly how you feel comfortable and most efficient. Let's start customizing our view. I'm going to change to the View ribbon tab. The first thing that we can change is what view we're looking in. On the left-hand side, I can click Change View to see the different view types. It divides to Compact view, that's where we are now. I can change this, I can also go into Single view and I get a much more condensed view with more data in it. I can also turn the Preview pane on or off by toggling the Preview button. Here you can get a great view of how much data you can actually see in this single view. Let's take a look at this new hire guide. I see an email here, and further down, I see another email. This is the original that was sent out. I can see these emails grouped by conversation. I'm going to click Show as Conversations. And then I need to decide if I want that in all my mailboxes or just this one. I'll select this folder, and now I have an expanded view of this conversation. Here's the original followed by the replies. In fact, I can even see my replies here. I can see that they're currently located in the Sent Items folder. I can click the drop-down arrow next to the email to collapse this view and minimize it. Right now we're looking at our email with a one sentence preview of the message body. I can choose to turn that on or off or even add more lines by clicking Message Preview. I can add three lines. And I can turn it off completely. If I turn it off, I'll only see who the message is from and the subject line of the email. I can choose how I want to arrange my emails. I'm going to turn off conversation view for a minute. I can decide how I want my emails arranged. By default, it arranges my emails by date, with the newest emails on top and the oldest emails on the bottom. I'm going to click the more icon to expand this view. These are all the different categories that I can choose to sort my emails from. For example, if I click From, my emails will be sorted in alphabetical order by who the sender is. I can change the sort order by either clicking the triangle next to From, directly in the view itself, or I can click Reverse Sort next to the arrangement category. Arranging by different categories is incredibly useful, especially if I sort by size. This gives me a great view of how I can quickly find my large attachments in my email. I can even add columns to a view. I can click Add Columns and I can add any information that might be useful to me in this view. I can select a piece of information, click Add and it will show up on the right-hand side. I can also reorder these items. I'm going to move this dialog box out of the way. I can see that there's a red exclamation mark over here letting me know that this email has been classified as important. And I'll show you how to do that later. But here's the Importance category. I can move this up in the list by clicking Move Up. I'll send it to the top of the list and click OK. You'll notice that my columns have now rearranged themselves and the exclamation mark is furthest on the left-hand side. If I make a change to a view, and I'm not happy with it, I can reset back to the default view anytime by clicking Reset View. I'll click Yes, I'm sure I want to reset the view 'Preview' and it's going to put it back to all the defaults. If I make changes and I like them so much I don't want to lose those changes, I can save a view. Click Change View and select Save Current View As a New View. Give it a name and click the OK button. Your custom view will be saved and you can access it anytime by changing to the View ribbon tab, clicking Change View and you can find your view here. I can right-click on my custom view and delete or rename it at any time. I'm going to click back on the Compact view for now. There's a few things that I can do in this view. In the Compact view, I can also click on these icons on the top right-hand side to change the sort order. Here's the newest mail. I can toggle it to set the oldest mail at the top. I can also change the way that the view is arranged in choosing a new category to sort by. I can also toggle the alphabetical order in this view. Finally, I can toggle on the Reading Pane or the Folder Pane on and off. I can select the Folder Pane and still in the View ribbon tab, by default it sets itself to Normal. However, I can select the Minimized view. It's going to give me a very compact view of the Folder Pane on the left-hand side. I can then click on these links to get to my items. I can also turn it off completely, to which I'll have to come back into this View ribbon tab and turn it back to Normal. I can toggle the Reading Pane on or off. By default, it turns it on on the right hand side, however, I can also have it on the bottom of my screen. I can turn it off completely or I can put it back on the right-hand side of the screen. We'll be working with the To-Do Bar and the People Pane later, so I won't worry about those for now. When I'm all done customizing my view, I can change back to the Home ribbon tab and continue working.
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