How to

How to Format an Individual Column in an Outlook Folder

Outlook lets you produce and personalize folder views in lots of ways, like adding and eliminating columns; organizing and sorting messages; and even applying conditional formatting. You can also personalize how Outlook shows info in particular columns with the format columns alternative. Let’s have a look at it.

To begin, we’ll open up the Advanced View Settings window. Change to the “View” tab on the Ribbon and click the “View Settings” button.

You can also get there by right-clicking a column header and choosing the “View Settings” command from the context menu.

The Advanced View Settings window lets you tailor the folder view. Click the “Format Columns” button.

The Format Columns window displays all of the columns that you can edit in the currently-selected view.

The columns revealed here are all of the ones in the default “compact” folder view. The Mention column is missing out on because that a person has particular formatting you can’t alter. That’s unusual; you can format most columns here.

The kind of formatting you can do is determined by the column. The Importance column just lets you pick between using a bitmap (an image file that shows an up or down arrow for High and Low value respectively) and text (the written name of the importance: High, Normal, Low).

The Subject column, on the other hand, lets you edit all of the choices (although the only choice for Format is “Text,” so not much to change there).

As you can see from the options, you can’t change the typefaces because this would encounter conditional format, but you can change the display screen format, the visible name of the column, the width, and the alignment. We’re going to change the Label to “Reason for mail” and the alignment to “Right.”

After clicking “OK” a couple of times to leave out of those windows, we can see the column modifications immediately in our folder.

One of the more useful modification is to the “Received” column. By default, it shows when the gotten date for messages in a rather unwieldy mix of “day” + “date” + “time,” which isn’t extremely viewer friendly. With column format, you can change this.

Go to View Settings > > Advanced View Settings > > Format Columns and select the “Received” field. The default Format is “Best Fit,” however if you struck the drop-down menu, you’ll see a lot of other options.

We’re going to change to the leading choice to remove the “day” part of the format.

When “OK” out of the open windows, the column has actually changed, and it’s much easier to check out.

You can pick whatever format works best for you, so if you’re the sort of individual who keeps their messages under control, you may want to do without the year. If you’ve really got control of your mail, you can simply reveal the time the message arrived, however we’re not all set to do without the day and month yet.

You can change any column that appears in the Format Columns panel, and if you apply the folder view to any other folder, the modifications to column formatting you’ve made also transfer over.

You can also personalize how Outlook shows details in particular columns with the format columns alternative. The columns revealed here are all of the ones in the default “compact” folder view. The Mention column is missing out on because that one has specific formatting you can’t change. The type of formatting you can do is identified by the column. As you can see from the choices, you can’t change the typefaces since this would clash with conditional formatting, but you can change the screen format, the visible name of the column, the width, and the positioning.

Leave a Reply