Outlook 2016 For Dummies. Dyszel Bill

Viewer shows you a slice of the information available. The Calendar, for example, can store dates as far back as the year 1601 and as far ahead as 4500. I use that to see the day when my credit card bills might finally be paid off, but in this economy, I may need to take a longer view. The smallest calendar slice you can look at is one day; the largest slice is a month.

      The Information Viewer organizes what it shows you into units called views. You can use the views that come with Outlook or you can create your own views and save them. (I go into more details about views in Chapter 10.)

You can navigate among the slices of information that Outlook shows you by clicking different parts of the Information Viewer. Some people use the word browsing for the process of moving around the Information Viewer; it’s a little like thumbing through the pages of your pocket datebook (that is, if you have a million-page datebook). To see an example of how to use the Information Viewer, look at the Calendar module in Figure 2-2.

       Figure 2-2: Your calendar in the Information Viewer.

      To browse Calendar data in the Information Viewer, follow these steps:

      1. Click the Calendar button in the Navigation bar (or press Ctrl+2).

      Your calendar appears.

      2. Click the word Week at the top of the Calendar screen.

      The weekly view of your calendar appears.

      You can change the appearance of the Information Viewer in an infinite number of ways. For example, you may need to see the appointments for a single day or only the items you’ve assigned to a certain category. Views can help you get a quick look at exactly the slice of information you need.

      When you choose the Day or Week view, you can click the tiny arrow in the bottom-right corner of the screen to see all the tasks scheduled for completion that day as well as any email messages you’ve flagged for that day. After all, if you have too many meetings on a certain day, you may not have time to finish a lot of tasks. You can drag a task from one day to another to balance your schedule a bit.

Navigating folders

      Most people don’t create multiple folders in Outlook, so folder navigation isn’t important for most people; the buttons in the Folder pane do everything most people need. On the other hand, I know people who create elaborate filing systems by creating dozens of Outlook folders for their emails and even their tasks. It’s personal: Some people are filers; some are pilers. Take your pick.

       A tale of two folders

      Folders can seem more confusing than they need to be because, once again, Microsoft gave two different things the same name. Just as two kinds of Explorer (Windows and Internet) exist, two kinds of Outlook exist – and way too many kinds of Windows exist. You may run across two different kinds of folders when you use Outlook – and each behaves differently.