Create a custom view

If you have special set of view settings that you use often, you can save it as a custom view.

Go to the View tab, click Change View and Manage Views. Click New.

Type a name and click OK, OK, and Apply View. Now we can set up the new view.

Click the group control, and let’s say we want the new view to group the list by From. Click Expand/Collapse, and click Collapse All Groups.

Now we can click Change View and switch between the default Compact view and the new By From view.

Let’s go back to Compact and I’ll show you another way to enter list settings. Click Change View > Manage Views, and New. Type a name, and click OK.

This is where you can go behind the scenes to find settings that aren’t directly available on the ribbon.

Click Group By. Then, uncheck Automatically group according to arrangement.

Click the Group items by list box, and select Categories. If this is all we did, it would be the same as selecting categories in the group control. But as you can see here, we can add more layers of grouping. In the box below, select Subject.

At the bottom, we can choose whether the list is expanded or collapsed by default. Select All collapsed. Click OK twice, and Apply View.

The new view reduces our list to collapsed category groups. Let’s expand one. Then, expand a subject. And there are the messages with the booking stores subject, which is in the Tour planning category.

Let’s create one more custom view. Click Change View, and Manage Views. Click New, type a name, and click OK.

We don’t have time to go into all the options here. But as you explore you’ll find that most of the settings apply to the table view, such as Columns and Sort. So let’s create a custom table view.

Click Other Settings. Under Reading Pane, select Off. With the reading pane gone, the compact list will stretch horizontally and change to a table. Click OK.

Next, click Columns. Click Categories in the right column, and click Move Up to place it above From. Click OK, OK, and Apply View.

And we get a table with the Categories column to the left of the From column. Now we can click Change View and easily switch between our custom views.

Next, you can explore the settings on the View tab and View Settings on your own. Don’t worry about making mistakes. You can always delete the view if it doesn’t work. If you modify a built-in view, just click Reset to bring it all back. For more information, check out the links in the course summary.