From the course: Outlook 2016 Essential Training

Customizing the status and navigation bar

From the course: Outlook 2016 Essential Training

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Customizing the status and navigation bar

- Let's talk about the Navigation Bar and the Status Bar. The very bottom horizontal bar of Outlook is called the Status Bar. It tells me the status of where I am currently in Outlook, so the contents are going to change dynamically. For example, I'm in my Inbox right now. If I want to know how many items there are total in my inbox, I can look at the status bar. There's 20 items total in here, and 2 of those items are unread. If I scroll a little bit further over, I can see the synchronization status of the current account that I have selected. Right now I'm Connected to Microsoft Exchange, and everything's syncing nicely. Further over to the right, I'm in what's called Normal View. However, I can change to something called Reading View, and clicking on that will collapse the folder pane on the left-hand side, and will give me a little bit more screen area to work with. I'll switch back to normal view for now. Finally, all the way to the right is a zoom slider. I can change the text zoom of the current email or calendar entry that I'm in, so I can see it more clearly, or I can zoom out to see the entire thing in one screen. I can also click on the percentage icon and I'll have more choices or I can go to 100% directly. I'll click OK, and I'm brought back to 100%. I can right-click on the status bar and customize what's going to show up in there. For example, I can add any mail Quota Information that my system administrator has set a size limit on my mail file, or I un-check showing Items in View if I don't want to see it. If I un-check it, I can see that it disappears from the status bar. Directly above this is what's called the Navigation Bar. This is how I can move back and forth between all aspects of Outlook. Right now I'm in Mail. It's the one that's colored in blue. I can click on the Calendar, or I can also click to get to my Contacts, which Microsoft calls People. The remaining visible icon is my Task List. There's some more things that we have that you can't see in this list, and I can access those by clicking on the three dots. For example, I can get to my Notes. I can change the way the navigation bar looks by clicking on Navigation Options. For example, I can only see four items in it because the default maximum number of visible items is currently set to four. I can see more or less items by changing these numbers accordingly. In addition, I can change the order in which they're displayed. If I want to move my Contact List up in front of Mail, I select it, hit Move Up, and People will be moved to the top of the list. I'll click OK, and I can see that it's been swapped. I'm going to click the three dots one more time. I'll get into Navigation Options, and I'll show you one more major change you can make to the Navigation Bar. By default it's sets to Compact Navigation. However, I can un-check this, click OK, and I'll get a much larger Navigation Bar that spells out each word. I'm going to click the three dots again and choose Navigation Options and I'll bring it back to Compact Navigation. The last thing I want to show you is something that Outlook call Peeks. A Peek is when I hover my mouse over each element of Outlook. For example if I hover my mouse over the Calendar, I can get a peek at what today's schedule is. I can even scroll through the list, and scroll through a calendar picker, without having to go into my Calendar. I can also do this for my contacts. I can hover my mouse over the Contact list, hover it over a contact, and click the email icon, and quickly send them an email with very few mouse clicks. So that's how you use the Status Bar, and you can customize the Navigation Bar.

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