Manage your Views in Outlook 2010 for Better Organization

Email is a huge part of day-to-day business, and it can take a lot of time out of your day to manage it. Fortunately, Outlook has a lot of great features that will help you manage your inbox and effectively handle your email as efficiently as possible.

Getting Different Views

Outlook has multiple views that display your inbox in different ways. This controls what information gets displayed as well as how it is displayed. Everyone is used to the default view, which displays email by date, placing the latest email on top and the oldest on the bottom. This is the date view. It also breaks messages up into segments such as Today, Yesterday, Last Week, etc.

To look at different views, click the View tab at the very top and look at the Arrangement group. You can arrange messages by size, sender, category, whether or not it has an attachment, and many other options.

On the right side of the Arrangement Group you can select Reverse Sort. This will display the list of messages in a reverse order - if you were arranging messages by file size, it would display the smallest ones on top, and if you were arranging messages by date it would display the oldest messages on top.

The Conversation View

For users familiar with Google's Gmail, Outlook 2010's Conversation View will make a lot of sense to you. If you aren't familiar with Gmail, essentially the Conversation View takes message conversations; emails that have been replied back and forth between two or more recipients, and lists them all together no matter where all of the messages are or the length of time between each message. This is extremely handy when trying to find an earlier part of an email conversation; it's all right there.

To try out Conversation View, click the View tab, make sure the Date view is highlighted, and select Show as Conversations. This will arrange your inbox, grouping together messages that are linked together by subject. Be sure to click Conversation Settings and select Show Messages from Other Folders, in case parts of conversations were stashed away in your various folders in Outlook.

Now you can expand conversations to see an entire history, regardless of how much time passed between emails and where the messages are actually stored.

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