The Navigation Pane allows you to move between folders through Outlook. There are four parts to this pane. The top part changes to show the view you’ve selected. The middle part has buttons for the different views. The bottom part has smaller icons for less commonly used features.  Finally, there are the customization options, accessed by using the customization arrow in the bottom right section.

 

Here’s a list of options available in the navigation pane buttons and labels:

-       Mail: Shows your mail folders. Mail folders include:

o   Deleted items (where deleted e-mail is stored)

o   Drafts (where you can save unfinished messages)

o   Inbox (where new mail is usually delivered)

o   Junk E-mail (where junk mail is moved to if the options are on)

o   Outbox (where e-mail sits until it is sent)

o   Sent Items (where e-mail you’ve sent is located)

o   Search folders (we’ll talk about these later)

-       Calendar

-       Contacts

-       Tasks

-       Notes

-       Folder List: Shows a list of all your folders in Outlook

-       Shortcuts: Shows shortcuts you have created

-       Journal

 

By default, when you open Outlook the Mail option will be selected because this is the one most people use. This view lets you see your favourite folders as well as your mail folders (we’ll talk more about favourite folders in the intermediate lessons). But what if you want to see your Calendar? All you have to do is click on the labelled button that says calendar and the view will change.

 

You can do the same for tasks and contacts. The smaller icons at the bottom will also change what you’re seeing in Outlook. Let’s click on the Notes icon; it’s the one that’s circled in the figure above.

 

But what if you use Notes a lot and you want it to have a larger icon like Mail? That’s where the customization options come in. If you click on the arrow next to the last icon  (you can look at the picture to the right if you need help finding it; has a blue circle around it). Once you click the arrow, a set of options will come up:

 

 

The first two, “Show More Buttons” and “Show Fewer Buttons” do exactly that; when you click on one it will add the first icon in the list at the bottom to the larger list up above, like this:  

  

That probably sounds confusing; let’s click on the arrow, and then click, “Show More Buttons” and you’ll see Notes change from an icon to a label. To be fair, you may not have really known what that was going to do. So, let’s click on the customization arrow again and choose “Show Fewer Buttons.” There! It’s back to the way it was. You can have all icons show as labels, or all the labels show as icons, or a combination; it’s up to you. 

Let’s play around with those two buttons for a few minutes, changing labels to icons, and then back again. Once you’ve got it the way you like it, we’ll move on!

Let’s click on that customization arrow again. The third option is “Navigation Pane Options.” When you click on this, a box will open. This might be an easier way to organize the buttons in the navigation pane; you can include an option just by checking it, or make it go away by unchecking it. You can also move an item up or down in the list just by clicking on it and clicking “Move Up” or “Move Down.” Once you’ve made your changes, click OK and they’ll be applied to the navigation pane. Let’s play around with these options for a few minutes. Once you’re done, just click reset in the Navigation Pane Options window and everything will go back to the way it was when we first looked at the navigation pane.

 

 

The last option in the customization arrow (“Add or Remove Buttons”) is an easy visual way to add or remove those small icons next to the customization arrow. The items that are already in the icon list will have a small box outlining the icon in the menu; the items that aren’t in the list won’t. In the example on the right, Notes and Shortcuts have been removed from the icons list.

 

Note that if you have four buttons listed in the navigation pane, and you remove one of those using Add/Remove Buttons, it will take the first icon and move it to a label, like we did using the “Show More Buttons” command earlier.

 

Let’s click on the button labelled “Mail” so we can look at our next component, the Reading Pane.