The Folder Pane in Outlook is the main navigation method between your mailboxes, folders and the separate modules such as Mail, Calendar and Contacts.
This pane does contain a couple of options and other “secrets” to fit it to your style and work with it more efficiently.
Creating contacts is easy and before you know it, you’ve got several dozen or even hundreds of them in your Contacts folder. It is very likely that some of them hold relations with one another like the same company or the same address.
When you store such info with your contacts, you probably don’t want to open every contact and add the same information to it. Or even worse; Do you want to change the address for every contact when the company relocates? I know I wouldn’t!
The following method describes an easy way to update general information for contacts that are sharing the same details in one or more Contact field.
The New Mail Desktop Alert is a handy pop-up alert for new emails. However, an often heard complaint is that it goes away too quickly.
Another often heard complaint is that it only works for the Inbox folder.
This guide explains how you can configure to display a New Mail Desktop Alert for all your mail and/or for it to remain visible for longer than 30 seconds or even not to let it go away at all until you dismiss it.
Continue reading: Creating a permanent New Mail Desktop Alert
Outlook holds a lot of icons to indicate different item types and other item properties. Below you’ll find a long list of these icons and their meaning.
Although the Import and Export wizard allows you to export to an Excel spreadsheet, the Wizard doesn’t allow you to export all the fields and filtering the mapped fields is a cumbersome process as well.
The export to Excel option has been removed from Outlook 2013 mainly because it was still using the old xls-format instead of the new xlsx-format. You can still achieve the same by exporting to the csv-format but that can be even more cumbersome.
Fortunately there is another, more graphical (WYSIWYG), way to do this as well via the copy/paste method.
There can be various reasons which will require you to downgrade to a previous version of Outlook such as the current trial/beta version expiring or compatibility issues with some needed add-ins or business software. This guide provides solutions to various problems you may encounter when trying to downgrade Outlook or when you need to remain compatible with previous versions of Outlook. Continue reading: Downgrading Outlook and backwards compatibility
Seeing messages being sent or are you getting sending errors without something in the Outbox?
This could be a stuck Read Receipt.
As they are invisible in your Outbox, it is kinda tricky to delete them. You can still do this via one of the following advanced (free) support tools from Microsoft: MFCMAPI or MDBVU32.
Ever had the feeling that the option you need the most is just too far down all sorts of menus? Well then customizing the Toolbar is probably the solution for you.
This guide will explain how you can do this by means of some examples that go more advanced. Although this is mainly targeted on Outlook, note that this guide applies to practically all Office programs.
Outlook comes with lots of command line switches and parameters which can be very handy for troubleshooting and (limited) automation.
This guide contains an overview of all available command line switches per Outlook version and how they can be used.
Continue reading: Command line switches for Outlook 365, 2021, 2019, 2016, 2013, and previous
For certain actions, Outlook holds a list of most recently used items (MRU lists) so you have quicker access to them. In some cases you might want to clear this MRU list.
Outlook holds two different kind of MRU lists. Some are tied to the general Outlook configuration of the logged in user and others are tied to the specific mail profile Outlook has been started with.
To clear either MRU list, you can simply delete the corresponding registry key when Outlook is closed. If you are not comfortable editing the Registry yourself you can use OutlookTools instead.
