How to Create, Manage & Change Inbox View in Outlook

Views in Microsoft Outlook give you different layouts in terms of the way the items in the folders look. In this post, we see how you can create and change the Views of the Inbox folder in Microsoft Outlook.

How to change Inbox View in Outlook

Each folder allows you to change and customize its font type, font size, reading pane, and other items in it. You can change the Inbox View to organize the items in the folder as per your requirements. You can also customize the current view using the advanced view settings. Advanced View Settings include removing and adding fields, grouping, sorting, filtering, column formatting, and other settings.

You can change the current view of the Inbox folder or any other folder to another view as per your needs.

To do so, open Microsoft Outlook, go to the View tab; and under the Current View, click on the Change View dropdown menu. You will see three types of Views:

1. Compact,
2. Single, and
3. Preview.

The compact view is the default view. Click Manage Views to create, modify, and apply views to the Inbox folder. You can create a new view, modify and copy a view, and reset as well. This window displays all of the available views of the current folder and its associated settings.

In the Create a New View window, type the name of the new view, select the type of view you want, and the visibility of the folder. Click OK to proceed.

In types of view, you have various options such as ‘Table’, which displays the items in columns and rows; ‘People’, which displays a list of people; ‘Timeline’, which shows items accessed over a time period; ‘Card’, which lays out items in a card view; ‘Business Card’, which displays items using an alternative view; ‘Day/Week/Month’, which shows items in a day/ week/ month style; ‘Icon’, which shows icons for the items.

Advanced View Settings

To customize the current view using Advanced View Settings, click on the View Settings option in the Current View group. The Advanced View Settings dialog box will open. Click on Other Settings. Here you can adjust the font display of the items in your view. To change the font size of the message preview, sender name, and subject in the default Inbox view, choose Row Font. Select the font, font style, and font size of your preference, and then click OK to save your settings and apply your changes.

If you want to change the font, font style, and size for the message preview (the line of message text you see under the subject and sender), select Font under Message Preview.

In the advanced view settings dialog box, there are various other settings related to sorting, filtering, column formatting and so on. You can add or remove a column, choose the order of the columns, sort, and filter items, set up rules for conditional formatting, as well as reset the settings of the current view to the original default settings of the folder. If you want to change the Inbox view in Outlook by changing the appearance of the items in the view based on whether or not the items match the given criteria, then click on Conditional Formatting.

The dialog box will open where you can create rules that apply conditional formatting to items that match a given criteria. To add a new rule to the list, click the Add button at the right side of the dialog box.

Change the font size for messages when composing, replying, forwarding

To do so, click on File > Options > Mail > Stationery and Fonts.

You can use Stationery to change default fonts and styles, colors, and backgrounds. Under the Personal Stationery tab, click on Font for New Mail Messages or Replying or Forwarding Messages to change the default font, font size and color. Make the necessary changes and then choose OK.

How to Zoom In or Out while Reading

You can not change the font or font size in the Reading Pane but you can zoom in or zoom out easily. To do so, at the bottom right of the reading pane, you will see the zoom slider.

Click on the Percentage (usually 100%) to open the Zoom While Reading dialogue box. You can choose the level of percentage you prefer and then click OK. Select the Remember my preference checkbox to set the same zoom level across all messages.

How do you organize and manage emails in Outlook?

You can try different things to organize and manage your emails in Outlook. You can create different folders to organize your email messages so that you can find your emails quickly whenever needed. Creating folders in Outlook is similar to creating labels in Gmail. Outlook also lets users create Rules for email messages.

Read: How to reset Outlook view to default on Windows

How do I change Outlook to Classic view?

You can change the Outlook view back to the Classic view by resetting the Outlook view. To do so, first, close Outlook, then open the Run (Win + R) command box, type outlook.exe /cleanviews, and click OK. If this does not work, open Outlook, go to “View > Change View,” and elect Compact or Single view.

We hope that this post has helped you learn how to create, change, and manage Views in Outlook by customizing the font, font style, and size of a folder by using the advanced view settings.

All the best!

Now read: How to assign Sound Alerts for New Incoming Email Messages in Outlook.