Customize the inbox

- [Instructor] 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 by customizing our view. In the inbox or above any folder, you'll see this icon that says By Date. You can click on that dropdown and change how you wanna look at your mail. The first thing that you can add is a filter. For example, you can only show your unread mail. I'll turn it back to All Mail and after that, you can choose how it's arranged.

It defaults by date and you'll notice that it's even grouping it. For example, it's grouped by mail by last week. It makes it easy to find current mail and your older mail. For example, I can change to sort it by who the message is from. This is a categorized list. It's sometimes called Sort By Sender and if I'm looking for something specific, I can even click these triangles and collapse the list and only open the particular name that I'm looking for.

I'll click By From one more time and I'll change it to another useful one which is By Size. This is a great way to find large attachments in your inbox or if you're looking for a particular email that you know came with a large attachment. While 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 so that the largest is on top or the smallest is on top. It's a toggle. Because this is going to show you smallest to largest or largest to smallest.

If you change to anything else, it could change to an A to Z sort order. It all depends on how you're looking at the view. By Date will always show you the newest on top, but if you click this arrow, it will show you the oldest on top and newest at the bottom. So you can change any of this. I'm going to click it again because way down at the bottom, you have the option to turn off focused inbox if you don't like it. Remember, focused inbox is a tabbed list at the top of your inbox.

Outlook determines what it thinks is your important mail and puts it in the focused inbox. Everything else, such newsletters or maybe other weekly emails will go in the other folder. If you don't like working that way, maybe you like everything just in one inbox because you're afraid you're going to miss it. That's fine, you can turn it off by unchecking Show Focused Inbox. It goes back to an All or Unread tabbed interface like it did with our Gmail account. There is another way to turn it on.

You can change to the View ribbon tab. Right here is a big button that says show focused inbox, so I'm going to turn it on again by clicking it. There's some more things that we have in this View ribbon tab. Let's take a look at this email. This is a reply. The subject line is, Do we need to schedule a meeting? I can see that right below that there's another email with the same subject. These two emails are very clearly part of a conversation. If I wanna group those together in the View ribbon tab, check off Show As Conversations.

I need to decide if I wanna do that in all my mailboxes or just this folder. I'll say this folder and it's grouped everything nice and tidy in their own collapsible list. I'll click the triangle to expand it and here I can see every email that's part of that conversation. If we move to the right, I see another button that says Message Preview. You'll also notice that these emails, in addition to the subject line, contains one line of a little bit of detail of that email so I can see what it's about.

I can turn that on or off or add more to it. I can add two or three lines of preview text. Once again, I'll change it in this folder or I can turn it off completely. I'll keep it back to the default just because that's what I'm used to seeing. Let's move over to the Layout area. The Layout area is where we choose what we're looking at. In the Folder pane area, I can make it minimized or turn it off completely.

If it's minimized, my Folder area becomes a compact list of just icons. I can expand it at any time by clicking this triangle right at the top. The pushpin will keep it open all the time. If I don't like that Favorites area at the top, I can always uncheck Favorites and it will go away. I can also choose how the Reading pane behaves. The Reading pane defaults to the right. I can move it to the bottom of the screen and I can turn it off completely.

If I turn the Reading pane off completely, if I wanna see what's in an email, I have to double-click on it. It's going to open it up in a new window and to close it, I'll have to click the X on the top of the screen. I'll turn the Reading pane back on to the right, and now, all I have to do is click on each email and the reading pane is on the right-hand side. We'll be working with the To Do bar and the People pane later so I'm not going to worry about those for now, but when I'm all done customizing my view, I can change back to the Home ribbon tab and continue working.