the main screen as easily as you move around the rooms of your home.
Today, most people expect to find their way around a website or a computer program by clicking something on the left edge of the screen and seeing something appear in the middle of the screen. Outlook follows that pattern by putting the navigation controls on the left side of the screen – just the way you’d expect. The way it’s arranged sounds confusing at first, but it becomes utterly obvious after you’ve used it once or twice.
The Outlook main screen – which looks remarkably like Figure 2-1 – has all the usual parts of a Windows screen (see this book’s Introduction if you’re unfamiliar with how Windows looks), with a few important additions. At the left side of the screen, you see the Folder pane. Next to the Folder pane is the Information Viewer – the part of the screen that takes up most of the space.
Figure 2-1: The Outlook main screen.
All the work you do in Outlook is organized into modules, or sections. Each module performs a specific job for you: The Calendar stores appointments and manages your schedule; the Tasks module stores and manages your To-Do list; and so on. Outlook is always showing you one of its modules on the main screen (also known as the Information Viewer). Whenever you’re running Outlook, you’re always using a module, even if the module has no information – the same way your television can be tuned to a channel even if nothing is showing on that channel.
Each module is represented by a label along the bottom left edge of the screen. Clicking any label takes you to a different Outlook module:
✔ The Mail label takes you to the Inbox, which collects your incoming email.
✔ The Calendar label shows your schedule and all your appointments.
✔ The People label calls up a module that stores names and addresses for you. Sometimes, Outlook calls this the Contacts module – but don’t worry, they’re the same thing.
✔ The Tasks label displays your To-Do list.
The Folder pane occupies a tiny strip on the left edge of the screen. Normally, it’s just big enough to accommodate some text displayed sideways, showing the names of a few email folders. You can widen the Folder pane by clicking a small arrow at the top of the list of text labels and then shrink it back by clicking the same arrow again.
Outlook speeds your work by letting you deal with several kinds of information in one place. It does that by organizing those different types of information into folders. Most people only think about folders when they’re dealing with email, which is why Outlook only makes its folders completely visible when you’re dealing with email.
The bottom of the Folder pane can have tiny icons representing each major Outlook function but only if you choose the Compact Navigation option. You can make that happen with these steps:
1. Click the View tab on the Ribbon.
2. Choose Folder Pane and then Options.
3. Click the check box labeled Compact Navigation.
The Information Viewer is where most of the action happens in Outlook. If the Folder pane is like the channel selector on your TV set, the Information Viewer is like the TV screen. When you’re reading email, you look in the Information Viewer to read your messages; if you’re adding or searching for contacts, you see contact names here. The Information Viewer is also where you can do fancy sorting tricks. (I talk about sorting contacts, tasks, and so forth, in the chapters that apply to those modules.)
Because you can store more information in Outlook than you can see at any one time, the Information Viewer shows you a slice of the information available. The Calendar, for example, can store dates as far back as the year 1601 and as far ahead as 4500. I use that to see the day when my credit card bills might finally be paid off, but in this economy, I may need to take a longer view. The smallest calendar slice you can look at is one day; the largest slice is a month.
The Information Viewer organizes what it shows you into units called views. You can use the views that come with Outlook or you can create your own views and save them. (I go into more details about views in Chapter 10.)
You can navigate among the slices of information that Outlook shows you by clicking different parts of the Information Viewer. Some people use the word browsing for the process of moving around the Information Viewer; it’s a little like thumbing through the pages of your pocket datebook (that is, if you have a million-page datebook). To see an example of how to use the Information Viewer, look at the Calendar module in Figure 2-2.
Figure 2-2: Your calendar in the Information Viewer.
To browse Calendar data in the Information Viewer, follow these steps:
1. Click the Calendar button in the Navigation bar (or press Ctrl+2).
Your calendar appears.
2. Click the word Week at the top of the Calendar screen.
The weekly view of your calendar appears.
You can change the appearance of the Information Viewer in an infinite number of ways. For example, you may need to see the appointments for a single day or only the items you’ve assigned to a certain category. Views can help you get a quick look at exactly the slice of information you need.
When you choose the Day or Week view, you can click the tiny arrow in the bottom-right corner of the screen to see all the tasks scheduled for completion that day as well as any email messages you’ve flagged for that day. After all, if you have too many meetings on a certain day, you may not have time to finish a lot of tasks. You can drag a task from one day to another to balance your schedule a bit.
Most people don’t create multiple folders in Outlook, so folder navigation isn’t important for most people; the buttons in the Folder pane do everything most people need. On the other hand, I know people who create elaborate filing systems by creating dozens of Outlook folders for their emails and even their tasks. It’s personal: Some people are filers; some are pilers. Take your pick.
A tale of two folders
Folders can seem more confusing than they need to be because, once again, Microsoft gave two different things the same name. Just as two kinds of Explorer (Windows and Internet) exist, two kinds of Outlook exist – and way too many kinds of Windows exist. You may run across two different kinds of folders
