About Outlook 2007 MailDespite all the power and flexibility Microsoft has poured into Outlook 2007, the vast majority of users spend the vast majority of their time working with email. This section of the Living With Outlook site is dedicated to helping you with Outlook 2007's email features. Note: When talking about electronic mail, the terms email and mail are used synonomously. I will be using them interchangeably. Let's start by taking a look at the default Outlook 2007 Mail view:
Take a look at the figure above. The leftmost pane of the Outlook window is the Navigation Pane. The Navigation PaneThe Navigation Pane replaces the Outlook Bar and Folders List that were in previous versions of Outlook. Its basic function is to allow you to navigate around Outlook quickly and easily. Note: What I'm describing here is what most people will see when they are in Outlook's default Mail view. The program's user interface changes to aid you with whatever you are doing at the time, and much of the interface is also customizable, so what you see may differ from what I describe, even if you are in Mail view. But don't panic. Throughout this site, you'll find information on how views change, and on how to customize them to look the way you want them to. At the top of the Navigation Pane is the Favorite Folders area. You can drag the icons for your favorite folders into this area, then click the icons to jump instantly to the folders. At the bottom of the Navigation Pane, you should see four large icons, Mail, Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks. Just like the folder icons in the Favorite Folders area, you can click these to instantly jump to one of these major sections of Outlook. Below these four large icons, you should see smaller icons that lead to other sections of Outlook such as Notes, the Folders List, and Shortcuts. In the center of the Navigation Pane you'll find a list of Mail folders. These lead us to the next section of the default Mail view.The Inbox PaneWhen the Inbox is selected in the Navigation Pane, the Inbox Pane displays the contents of the Inbox. We're calling it the Inbox Pane for simplicity, because this pane will actually display the contents of whichever folder is selected in the Navigation Pane, and calling it the "Pane That Shows Whatever is Selected in the Navigation Pane" all the time would be crazy. The title of the pane automatically changes to reflect the name of the folder selected in the Navigation Pane so you'll always know what content you're seeing. By default, when displaying the contents of a Mail folder, the Inbox Pane shows two lines of information for each message in the folder. This key information is often enough to allow you to decide what to do with a particular message without having to read it, and can be a huge time saver. The items in the Inbox Pane are typically displayed by date, but you can easily change that to an order that works for you. Clicking on a particular item in the Inbox Pane selects it, and leads us to the next pane to the right. The Reading PaneThe Reading Pane is an optional pane that can be turned on and off from Outlook's View menu. When it is active, it will appear either to the right of the Inbox Pane (as shown in the figure) or below it. In either case, the Reading Pane displays the contents of the item selected in the Inbox Pane. With it active, you can see what's in a message without opening it in its own window. If you double-click an item in the Inbox Pane, its contents not only appear in the Reading Pane, but Outlook opens a new window containing just the item you double-clicked. To the right of the Reading Pane is the new To-Do Bar. Click Here to learn more about the To-Do Bar. More InformationThe links below will lead you to more information about Outlook 2007 Mail:
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