From the course: Outlook 2016 Essential Training

Touring the Outlook interface

From the course: Outlook 2016 Essential Training

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Touring the Outlook interface

- It can be overwhelming to see all the features of Outlook at once. Right now, let's break it down into all the individual pieces that make up the application. Starting at the very top left-hand side of the screen, we have the quick access toolbar. It's called that because it's always in the same place and it's always visible. You can click the down arrow and add any items that you like that you find yourself using frequently. Directly underneath that, is the ribbon. The ribbon is a tabbed interface and it's across all Microsoft products. The more commonly used tasks are in the Home tab and any other subtasks of where you are will appear in different tabs. The tabs change depending upon 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. You can collapse the ribbon at any time by clicking the arrow in the bottom right-hand side of the ribbon. It's going to collapse the ribbon to give you a little bit more screen area to work with. You can still click on any item in the ribbon tab, and to bring it back permanently, click the push pin in the bottom right hand side. The only exception to this tabbed 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. A new feature of Outlook is the Tell Me feature. I can click my mouse inside Tell me what you want to do, and type some tasks. Outlook can take me right to that option so that I can find it easily. On the very bottom of the screen we have the status bar. The status bar tells me things like how many items are in a particular folder, if my folders are syncing, the status of the mail file that I'm connected to, and it even gives me a zoom slider at the bottom of the screen. Directly above the status bar is the navigation bar. I can customize this and I'll be talking a lot about the navigation bar in the next video. but for now, to move between different aspects of Microsoft Outlook, you can click on the icon. Right now we're in mail, but I can click to access my calendar, or my contacts, which Microsoft calls People. It also gives me something called a peek view. If I hover my mouse over these icons, I can get little peeks at my calendar or my favorite contacts. I'll click to go back into my mail right now. 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 my mail file, I can see a list of my inbox and other mail items. I can even scroll down and see any additional email accounts that we've added. I can click on a folder and see the contents of that folder appear in the middle of the screen. In fact, I can click on an email and see a preview of the email appear on the right-hand side. We'll be going over how to customize all these views. There's one more thing I want to 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, I can click and expand my inbox and see any folders or subfolders that we've created. I can also click and expand this Favorites list, and I see an arrow on the right-hand side here and clicking on that will minimize this folder pane. I've now got a compact view of that folder pane, and I can click on the triangle again and the push pin to bring it there permanently. Arrows aren't just in the folder lists. You'll also see arrows a lot in the ribbon tab. Clicking on an arrow will bring up a much larger list of choices you have for that one particular option. In fact, even in the categories themselves, there's some more arrows. Clicking on an arrow on the bottom right-hand side of the ribbon pane will bring up a further dialog box in which you can make some more changes. I'll click Cancel here and there's one more arrow that we can see to access some more options. So that's a quick overview of the basic navigation in Microsoft Outlook. Up next, let's go over the status bar and the navigation bar in detail.

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