Randy Dean shows how to use Microsoft Outlook's redesigned home screen, including pinning folders, peeking at Calendar or Tasks as temporary windows, and docking them as side panels. You can view your calendar while reading email or see tasks while checking the calendar, and drag either to a second monitor for dual-screen workflows.
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Hi everybody, Randy Dean, Email Sanity Expert here. Happy New Year to all of you coming off the holiday. Wanted to follow up on the brief video I made before the holiday about the changes to the home screen in the Microsoft Outlook local client version. As a quick reminder, let's go out to my Outlook screen. And what basically happened is, and if you haven't seen this yet, it's probably coming. The apps are now listed up here in the left-hand side upper corner. Uh, you might still be seeing them down here if you haven't had this update yet, but it looks like this is going to be a permanent change, moving them up in this direction in one of your upcoming updates. If you haven't seen it yet, uh, last video I made, I wanted to explain, um, a reason why I thought some people might panic. When I first opened this new screen view, all I could see was the icons for email, calendar, and contacts. I couldn't see tasks, I couldn't see folders, realized that I had to come down here into more apps to enable these so that they would show as a standard view. And then once I did that, I had to click on the folders and then actually open them up so that I could see my folders. And I, I prefer to see my folders as a regular view. So one of the things that I did is I hit the pushpin over here to make it so my folders would always show. So, you know, and I'll give you a link to the video for that at the end of this video. But this isn't really the reason I wanted to show you this. What I wanted to do instead was sort of show you a cool little feature that I discovered inside of this new setup. It's called the peek. And let me show you, sort of show you what it means. I'm gonna move myself down a little bit and out of the way. I discovered this when I was sort of playing around with it. You'll see up here at the top we have the calendar, and I've got this on inbox view. I've clicked on the inbox icon. I can see my inbox. If I come up here to calendar and I do a right-click, I can either show the peek or dock the peek. Now, show the peek will bring up a little peek window of your calendar, and then you can sort of page down and see what's going on in your calendar. However, if you come back and do a right-click and do dock the peek, It'll give you that little window as a basically a permanent view, or at least semi-permanent view on the side of your inbox. And if you need to close it though, you can come up here and hit the little X and close it so you can sort of play around with your screens. And get this, it doesn't just work for Calendar. Right-click over here, show the peek. I can get a little view of my task list and or I could right-click, dock the peek. And have a little view of my task list here. And now here's what's really cool. I'm going to close this. I am going to right-click and dock the peek for calendar on my inbox. Now check this out. I'm going to now open up my calendar and I'm going to right-click, dock the peek for my task list. In my calendar. So you see what that means? If I open up my inbox, I can see my calendar. And if I open up my calendar, I can see my task list, which is sort of cool. You can play around with these views. And yes, could you do task list in your inbox or could you do, you know, calendar on the side of your task list? Yeah. Now, one thing I want to remind you, though, is if you're a dual monitor user, I did a video on this some time ago. You could also consider this. You've got your calendar on the screen. You could come up here to Tasks, right-click and hit Open in New Window. And if you open it in new window and expand it a little bit in terms of size, you could then pick up that window and drag it to screen 2. And that means you could have calendar on one screen, task list on the other. Oh wait, second wrinkle. Or if you prefer to leave your inbox open, you could leave your inbox open with the calendar view in peek and task list on screen 2, or inbox task list with calendar on screen 2. So you've got a lot of options here. I really like this because it allows you to customize your screen a little bit better utilizing what's up here in the corner. So play around with it, see if you like it. Send me some comments if you have ideas. On how to use this. Now remember, like I said, watch the other video. I'll link it at the end of this video so that you can see a little bit more about this change to the home screen and understand what they're doing with the move up here, as well as how to get your apps to show the way you want them to again. One cool little thing, notice this, that if you open this up after you've got your task list and folders showing again, you can get to your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint right out of here too, which is very nice. So with that, let's go ahead and finish up this video. I'm going to jump us here to the end slide and make myself just a little bit bigger. And remember the trick on PowerPoint: Shift+Function+F5. Bam! Opens up the presentation to the screen that you're on. Thank you for your time. Like I said, I hope you're all having a good 2023 so far. Once again, my name is Randy Dean. You can learn more about me and what I do on my website, randaldean.com. And if you'd like to get access to my bonus tip sheets on Outlook, email, Gmail, Google Workspace 365, smartphones and tablets, just send me an email, randy@randaldean.com. Put YouTube PDF in the subject line. And as always, if you like these videos, please like, please subscribe, please comment. All those things help grow the channel. Thanks everybody. Have a great one.
