Customize the inbox

- [Instructor] Outlook has some great options for customizing the way you read your mail, to make it work exactly the way you feel comfortable and productive. Let's start by customizing our view. On the left-hand side, you may want to de-clutter this a little I may be getting rid of this All Accounts box. You can do that by clicking Outlook at the very top of the screen, choosing preferences, clicking general under personal settings, and then uncheck show all account folders.

I'm also going to click hide on my computer folders, because all my mail is either IMAP or Exchange, and there's no mail that's actually on my computer. I'll click the X to close out of that. And now let's move to the middle of the screen. Here's how you can decide how your email is arranged. It defaults to by conversation, and you'll notice that it's grouped by time. For example, here's a mail on Friday, here's one from three weeks ago.

You can change the sort order. I'll click by conversations. Here's everything that you can change to sort the message with. For example, I can change it to sort who the message is from. This is a categorized list. It's also known as sort by sender. And if I'm looking for someone specific, I can even click on these triangles and collapse the list and open only the particular name that I'm looking for. I'll click by from one more time and change to another useful one, which is by size.

This is a great way to find large attachments in your inbox, or if you're clicking on a particular email that you know came with a large attachment. When you're changing the view to any of these you can also change the order in which it's displayed. Clicking the arrow to the right of the sort order will change it so that the largest is on top, or the smallest. It's a toggle. Because this is by size, it's going to show you smallest to largest, or vice versa. If you change it to anything else, for example, I'll change back conversations, it could change to a date view, or it could change to an A to Z sort order, for example when we had it sort by sender.

With this view still open, down at the bottom you can see that you have the option to turn off focused inbox if you don't like it. You could uncheck it, and it will turn off those categories, leaving all your mail just in this one inbox. I'm going to scroll down, there's something else I want to show you. While you're scrolling, reading your mail, here I can see a message that has an expandable triangle next to it. If I expand that triangle, I can see separate emails.

These are part of a conversation. Because remember, we're currently grouped by conversations. If you don't like your emails grouped like this you can change it. I'm going to change to the organize ribbon tab. From here, I can click conversations. It's going to toggle it off, and now every email has the same subject line, but they're all separate individual emails. I'm going to toggle it back on, and I'll also click here to turn focused inbox on again.

This is another area where you can turn it on or off. If I move to the right, I see another button that says message preview. Each message, in addition to the subject line also contains one line of detail in light gray. I can turn this on or off if I find it distracting. I'm going to click reading pane now. This one has an arrow, which tells me that there's more options. I can view the reading pane on the right side of the screen, the bottom of the screen, or I can turn off completely.

With it turned off, if I want to read an email, I can double-click on it and open it up in a new window. I'll close out of this email, and set the reading pane back to the right-hand side. When I'm done, I'll change back to the home ribbon tab, and continue working on my email.