How to Customize Views In Outlook

( versions 2003 & 2007)

One of the advantages of using Outlook is that you can customize any View of the various modules to fit the way you work.  In Mail, Contacts and Tasks, most of your Views are in columns. Remember that each View can be customized. For example, in Mail, I can customize the View for a client folder, the Inbox folder, the Sent Items folder or even the Deleted Items folder. (Though why you should need to view Deleted Items is beyond my comprehension. They’re trash! If you are using Deleted Items as a storage folder, we need to talk.) Here are the steps to customize the View. I’m going to use a Mail folder in this example but the process is the same in Contacts or Tasks.

In the Mail module,

1. Select the folder you want to customize. I’m going to customize Sent Items.
2. Go to View on the menubar > Arrange By > Custom
3. Click on the Fields button in the Customize View window. 
4. Select available fields from: Use the drop-down menu to choose the type of fields you want to choose from. The default is “Frequently used fields” which may be just what you need. 
5. Available fields:  This is a list of all of the fields available to use. So if I chose “All Mail fields” in the step above, I would see all of the mail fields in Outlook.
6. Click the field you want to include in your view. I’m going to select the “To” field since I want to see who I sent the email to.
7. Click the Add button in the center of the window to add the field to the Show these fields in this order: list on the right side of the window.  This adds the “To” field to the bottom of the list.
8. Select the new field (the “To” field) then use the Move Up or Move Down buttons to place the field in the order you want. I would like to see the “Sent date” then the “To” field then the “Subject” field in my custom view.
9. Select and use the Up and Down buttons to arrange all of the fields as you want them.
10. Click the OK button in the bottom right corner of the window.
11. Click the OK button in the bottom right corner of the Customize View window.

Now when I look at my Sent Items folder, I see the fields I need in the order that I want them.

Note that you can click on any field heading to sort the data by that field. In other words, I can click on the “Sent” heading to sort all of the emails by the sent date. Or I could click on the To heading to sort all of the emails by the email address I sent the message to.