From the course: Outlook 2019 Essential Training

Navigate the interface

From the course: Outlook 2019 Essential Training

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Navigate the interface

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- [Instructor] It can be very overwhelming to see all of the features of Outlook all at once. Right now, let's break it down into all of the individual pieces that make up the application. The very top of the screen is the ribbon. The ribbon is a tab interface, and it's across all Microsoft products. The more commonly used tasks are in the home tab, along with any other add-ins that your network administrator may have installed for you. The tabs will change depending on what aspect of Outlook you're in. For example, these are the tabs that we're looking at in the mail section. The calendar section will have a completely different list of tabs. The only exception to this tab interface is the file tab. Clicking file will bring you into something called backstage view, which is mostly just account settings and other options that you can change. I'll click the arrow with the circle on it to get back to Outlook. If you're looking for something and you can't find it, use the tell me feature. I can click inside tell me what you wanna do, and start typing something that I may be looking for. Outlook will take me to that item. All the way on the bottom left-hand side of the screen is the navigation bar. To move between different aspects of Outlook, you can click on the icon. Right now we're in mail, but I can click to access calendar, my contacts, which Microsoft calls people, and it also gives me something called peek view. If I hover my mouse over any of these icons, I can get little peeks at my calendar or my favorite contacts. I'll click to go back to mail. Directly above this is the folder bar. The folder bar is going to change depending on what aspect of Outlook I'm in. For example, because I'm in mail, I see a list of my inbox and other mail items. I can even scroll down and see any other email accounts that I've added. I can click on a folder and see the contents of that folder up here in the middle of the screen. The contents change based on what folder I'm in. Microsoft also comes with something called focused inbox. Important emails are in one tab. The other tab is for any other email that Outlook thinks I might want to look at someday. When I click on an email, a preview of that email will appear on the right-hand side. There's one more thing I wanna show you. Throughout Outlook, we'll be seeing a lot of arrows. Arrows usually indicate that you can click on them to expand and get more options or views. For example, if I click on this arrow, it's going to expand a conversation. All the way on the left-hand side, if I click on this arrow, it's going to expand or collapse my inbox. Arrows aren't just in the folder list. You'll see arrows a lot in the ribbon tab. Clicking on an arrow will bring up a larger list of choices you have for that particular option. In fact, in even the categories themselves, there's more options and arrows to hover over. So that's a quick overview of the basic navigation of Microsoft Outlook.

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