Microsoft® Outlook® 2007 Bible

Chapter 19. Customizing Outlook to Suit the Way You Work

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Customizing the screen

• Customizing toolbars

• Customizing the menus

• Defining custom views

• Customizing Outlook Today

No matter how clever a software company is—and Microsoft is plenty clever—there's no way they can design a program that works just the way everyone wants it to. Recognizing this, Microsoft has made Outlook very flexible so that you can change many aspects of how it looks and works to suit you. This is the topic of this chapter.

Please note that customizing Outlook is not the same as setting program options, a topic covered Chapter 7 for email-related options and in other individual chapters as needed. Options affect how the program operates, whereas customization deals primarily with the screen appearance of the program and how you enter commands.

Customizing the Outlook Screen

Outlook provides you with many ways to customize the appearance of the screen.

Changing the Size of Screen Elements

Like any Windows program, you can change the size of the main Outlook window (assuming that it is not maximized to full-screen size) by pointing at a border or corner of the window and dragging to the desired size. You can also change the size of certain elements within the window. When you point at an element that can be dragged to change size, the mouse cursor will change to two parallel lines with arrow heads:

• Drag the right border of the navigation pane to change its width.

• Drag the horizontal border within the navigation ...