If you’re like most people, you use Outlook to manage your email. You open the email list pane, and then start sorting through the messages. You might see a message from your boss that you need to respond to right away, and then another message from your friend asking if you want to go out for drinks tonight. You can customize how the displayed fields in the email list pane look by using the Customize Fields button on the toolbar. When you click this button, Outlook displays a dialog box that lets you choose which fields to display in the list pane. Here are some tips for customizing how the displayed fields in the email list pane look:

  1. Choose which fields to display in the list pane by clicking on one of the field names in the left column of the dialog box. The selected field appears highlighted in blue.
  2. To add a new field to be displayed in the list pane, click on Add Field at the bottom of the dialog box. The Add Field dialog box appears, where you can enter a name for your new field and specify whether it is a text or numeric field.
  3. To change how an existing field is displayed in the list pane, select it from among those listed in the left column ofthe dialog box and then click on one ofthe options that appears below it: Show As Text (if it is a text field), Show As Number (if it is a numeric field), or Show As Date/Time (if it is a date or time field). ..

One of the nicest features in Outlook is the way the list view handles “Compact Mode” when you use the reading pane on the right-hand side of the screen… it switches to double-line to show more information easily. But did you know that you can actually make it display even more fields?

This is really useful if you want to be able to see a particular extra field at a glance. The latest version of Outlook lets you do color categories, but sometimes it’s easier to just see the textual version.

In the main Outlook screen click on View \ Current View \ Customize Current View.

In the Customize View window click on Fields.

Now the Show Fields screen opens and here is where you can add or remove fields, or choose the order the fields will be displayed.

The key thing to note in the Show Fields dialog is the “Maximum number of lines in compact mode”… for instance here I changed it to display 4 lines:

The interesting thing about this is that you can enable the view only for a particular folder or search folder, so you could easily switch between views on the same folder.