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Inbox Formatting Tips

Outlook has several options for formatting the Inbox. The tip for this week will cover a few of the most useful options.

Remember, if you have ideas for the Computing Tip of the Week,please send them to Pat Fellows.

Sorting the Inbox

The Inbox can be sorted using many different criteria. By default it is sorted by the receipt date. To change how it is sorted, click on Arranged by: Date (in this example), and a menu of choices will appear. Select a different menu option to change how the messages are sorted. One very useful sort is to sort by sender or From. Then hit the letter on the keyboard the person's last name begins with and Outlook will jump to that letter in the list. Notice you can also sort by several other options.

Grouping Messages in the Inbox

By default the Inbox messages are grouped. In the default configuration, messages are in groups as follows: "Today", "Yesterday", "Wednesday","Tuesday", etc., "Last Week", "Two Weeks ago", etc.

By clicking on the twisty,outlined in red here, the messages can be viewed in groups (when the twisty is a "-". When the twisty is a "+" the groups are collapsed to show only the title for the grouping. See the examples below showing an open and then a collapsed group. In this example the messages are sorted by the receive date.

Open grouping

Closed grouping

When sorting the Inbox by "From" for example, the grouping titles change to the names of the senders. Remember users can then jump to the sender they are searching for by using the keyboard and striking the key corresponding to the first couple letters of the sender's last name.

Users can turn off the grouping of messages on the menu used to change how messages are sorted. In the image showing the sorting options, "Show in Groups" is outlined in Red. Just click on that option to uncheck it and the groupings will go away.

Finally, groupings can be used in all mail message folders and sub-folders.

Using Color to Organize the Inbox

Users often have individuals they correspond with on a regular basis. It could be a supervisor, a group leader, a department chair or ?? Messages from those senders can be set to stand out in the Inbox as Outlook gives users the option to mark mail from selected individuals with different font colors.

To begin, select Tools>Organize.

This will bring up the "Ways to Organize Inbox " pane above the Inbox and Reading Pane. Click on the Using Colors link. The view that appears is shown below.

The steps for setting a color for a specific user are:

1. Click on a mail message from the user
2. Click on the drop down arrow under the #2 shown on the image and select "from"
3. Click on the drop down arrow by #3 and select the color to apply to that sender
4. Click on the Apply Color button (#4). This will apply the color to all messages from that sender in your Inbox. The color is not applied to any other folders. That has to be done on a folder by folder basis.

Sample

To turn off the color, follow the same steps and select AUTO for the color in Step 3.

There is a bug with this tool. It will apply the color to individuals with the same first or last name as the sender the color is applied to. This behavior may or may not occur for all users. An example of this is when I set all messages from Dick Cleek to be Red, those messages from Margaret Cleek and Dick Jarosch also appear in Red.