Outlook Email: Should You have the Reading Pane On or Off? Customize your e-mail screens and folders

Hi everybody. I thought I would do a bit of a technical video this time for my Outlook users in terms of giving you some ideas and options on the way you can customize your folder screens. So let's dive right in and talk about this. One of the big questions that I get in one of my, in my sessions is, Randy, I noticed that you don't have the preview pane open in your inbox. And I do that for a very specific reason. I like to see these columns. And with the columns, that allows you to, you know, sort your information if you wanted.

Like, for instance, let's say I wanted to sort by alpha.

I could click on Subject right here, and now you can see it went from being by date received to alpha order on the subject. And same thing works if you're in your Sent folder doing it by name.

I'm not going to go into my Sent folder because that might show everybody else's email addresses.

But I wanted to at least show you that the sorting capability, you can even sort by size of attachment. So like I could click on this and sort by size.

And if I do that, you'll notice I can go high to low or low to high.

So, so there's some cool capabilities in terms of what you can do utilizing these columns. Because of that, in my inbox and my Sent folder specifically, I tend to have my reading panel turned off.

Now you can get to your reading panel by going to the View tab at the top of the screen and going to Reading Panel. Now I know a lot of people like to have the reading panel on the right so that they can see a little bit of what's going on in that email and maybe do a reply, forward, etc.

Like I said, it's a personal preference.

You can choose what you want to do here, but I personally like having the access to those columns so that I can sort of look for stuff more quickly versus having the little reading panel open over to the side and thus not being able to see as many emails nor be able to do as much. Now, one interesting thing about reading panel, if you turn it off, let me show you a little something else that's hiding in here. Notice that you can actually come up here under message preview and you can add in lines, change preview setting. Now sometimes it'll ask you, do you want this in this folder or all folders, all mailboxes? I'm going to just do this folder and look, now I can see a little bit of the email and if I wanted, I could go even more extensive and go up to like 3 lines. And see quite a bit of what's happening at the top of the email. So that way you can still take advantage of the columns, but yet see a little bit more of what's going on on the inside. Once again, I prefer not to have that on, but I thought you would be interested in seeing that capability. And now here's yet another reason I sort of like having the reading panel turned off, especially in my inbox and my Sent folder where I'm often searching for stuff and and sorting by these different capabilities. You can even customize the columns. And the easiest way to do this is just come up near the top and do a right-click and come down and select this thing called Field Chooser, which will bring up this little dialog box. And notice, like, a good example here, let's say I wanted to see not only when I received the message, but I want to see when this message was originally created. For whatever reason, maybe I want to sort of spy and see if they wrote a couple drafts. Yes, but I can just click on this, pick it up and drag it over here and drop it right into the column. And then you can sort of resize these almost just like an Excel spreadsheet column so that I can see, you know, not only when I received the email, but when it was created. And if you don't want a column, what's cool about having Field Chooser open, you can just pick up the column and drag it back and drop it back in, and then it goes back to what you had before. So these are all— I'll be the first to admit— personal preference types of capabilities to get you to have the kind of screen that you prefer so that you can do what you need to do to do your job better, find your stuff faster, access your information better. Now what's interesting about this though, I'm going to turn off field chooser. I just want you to know something. In most of my subfolders, I have subfolders in a lot of my different areas. In most of my subfolders, I have the reading pane on because there I'm assuming that, well, I put the email in the folder, it's probably the information I'm looking for already when I see my list of emails. And when I click on an email, I'd like to see the text of that email. So I do keep my reading panes open, and you can sort of pick and choose which folders you want to have either the reading pane turned on and off, which folders you'd like to see your columns versus not. So, um, just an important customization to help you with better managing your Outlook screens. So that they fit what it is you are trying to do depending on the level of your folders in your emails that you're working on. So hopefully you find this one helpful. Play around with this stuff and turn it into the screen that you want it to be. And with that, why don't we go ahead and finish this one up? Once again, my name is Randy Dean, Email Sanity Expert. If you'd like to get more information about me and my programs, visit my website randalldean.com. You can also request my PDF productivity tip sheets on time, email, tech management, including Outlook and Google tips, as well as a whole lot more. Send me an email, randy@randalldean.com, and put YouTube PDF in the subject line.

And until next time, watch for another video.

Thanks. Bye, everybody.