What's up everybody? I've got a super quick Outlook tip for you today because this is something that I use all the time. I've used it for years and I didn't realise that nobody really knows about it or uses it. Now, sometimes when you are working in your inbox, you might want to be able to see a preview of your calendar and also any tasks that you've got for today in the same window as your email inbox.
So you're not having to jump back and forth between your calendar and your tasks list. Well, there's a really easy thing that we can turn on in order to facilitate this, and it's called the To-do bar. Now, you may not have ever noticed this little option lurking on the ribbon so let me show you. I'm currently in my Outlook inbox, and if I go up to the View ribbon all the way over in the Layout group just here, notice we have To do bar.
If we click the dropdown, this is where we can choose what we want to see in our inbox. So let's say that I want to be able to see my calendar, and I also want to be able to see any tasks. I can bring both of those up. And can you see they're now showing in a pane down the side. I could then rearrange my layout a little bit.
So instead of having the reading pane on the right hand side, I might want to move the reading pane to the bottom, or I could turn it off entirely. Remember all of this is adjustable, so I can bring this up. I can move this cross so it's got a little bit more room. But this is a really nice, efficient way of organising your mail so that you can see your mailbox, a little preview of your calendar, and any upcoming events for the week, and then any of your tasks at the bottom.
And you can manage all of these things from here as well. So if you want to mark a task as complete, we can still right click on it and we can say Mark complete to remove it from the list. So that little to-do pane is one of those little hidden gems in Outlook. Turn it on. I think you'll find it super useful.
