View your inbox your way

- [Instructor] There are four easy tools that you can use to make your inbox or any other mail folder accessible and easy to use. And these tools aren't subtle, they're right here. The first is a filter, it's the choice to see all messages or simply to see unread messages. By default when you fire up outlook, you see all messages. But if you're like me, and you leave messages in your inbox for a while and you want to simply look at the messages you haven't yet read, Simply click on Read, it will switch and show you the unread messages. To the right of the Unread filter tab is our sort order. And if you click, you'll notice that at the top we have a filter next we have arrangements, and at the bottom we have sort. If I want to switch back to all mail, I can I can also view mail that I'm mentioned in. There is no tab for mention, but if I choose mention, and there were items that I was in fact mentioned in, they would show up here. Let's go back to all mail. Note, in addition to the filter, I have a range, and right now this is the default arrangement, items are arranged by date. And this is using something called smart grouping. In the first group we see messages from today. This happens to be Thursday. If I hadn't cleaned out my messages from Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, I would see groupings for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. But beyond this week, we don't go by day, we go by week. So the next group I have is last week. And if I scroll a little further down, we see two weeks ago, and so on. I could also arrange messages, for example, by who they are from. I can arrange messages by whether or not they are flagged, which is a quick and easy way for me to find out if I have messages I need to work on without needing to go to my to do list. I can arrange them by size, which is incredibly helpful if what I'm trying to do is decide which messages I should clean out to get maximum space in my mailbox. I can arrange them by subject, by type, by whether or not they have attachments. Here are items that have attachments. And when I'm grouped like this, I can collapse groups, and I can expand groups. My messages with attachments, my messages without attachments. If I'm sorted, for example, by date, notice that this is newest on top. If I click, this will put the oldest on the top. The message I have selected is still the selected message, so I'm all the way down at the bottom of my mailbox now, and I'll have to scroll my way to the top to get back to, for example, messages from June. And then finally on the bottom of the drop down, I have some other choices. I have the ability to show a focused inbox. And if I chose focus, then instead of having All and Unread, I have Focused and Other. This is a different set of filters. If I have focused, then items that are sent only to me, items that come from inside of my organization, the kind of items that would be more of a priority, show up in focused. As opposed to items that are, for example, subscriptions or sent to a number of people. This is a choice. If you prefer, focused and other, then you simply make sure that the check mark is in front of Show focused inbox. If you don't prefer it, then you have the filter system of All and Unread. On the right hand side in this view, I have my reading pane, I'm going to go over to View and I'm going to go to Reading Pane, and I'm going to turn it off. And when I do notice that I get more columns for information. These columns can be used for sorting as well. Even though I have the ability to filter arrange and sort, I can click on anything to sort by a particular item. For example, to sort by who they're from simply click from, and note, we're now sorted by who they're from, by when they were received, by how large they are, and so on. As soon as I turn my reading pane back on again, if I put it at the right, notice that even though the type of sort that I have, which was by size, is still the sort, that I don't have the columns to click on any longer because there simply isn't room for them. For more information on how you can view your inbox, take a look at the tools that are on the view ribbon, including choices like show focused inbox, when that's on or off, it switches the filter. How you'd like your message preview to appear. Whether you'd like to be displaying the Folder Pane, the To Do bar, and so on. There are dozens of ways that you can display your inbox. If the way you're displaying it isn't working for you, make some adjustments, choose a new way.