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Outlook 2010's Status Bar View Button

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› Outlook › Outlook 2010’s Status Bar View Button

Last reviewed on August 25, 2014     8 Comments

Outlook 2010 has a nifty feature in the status bar: view buttons. This is especially useful on netbooks and laptops with small screens to quickly show more of the reading area. Each folder type has at least two buttons: one to set the navigation pane, to-do bar, and ribbon to open (Normal view) and one button to minimize those elements, giving you more room to read your mail or view calendar or contacts.

Outlook 2010's Status bar buttons

These buttons are preprogrammed for "set to-do, navigation pane, and ribbon to Normal view", not "restore my previous settings". They create a view that matches the icon: open all the panes or minimize them to allow more reading space.

Expanded reading layout in Outlook 2010

Normal layout with 4 panes in Outlook 2010

If you prefer a specific layout, such as the navigation pane always minimized or the to-do bar turned off, don't use the buttons, use the minimize/expand button on the other features or the keyboard shortcuts to show or hide the panes. You can hide the buttons but right clicking on the status bar and removing the check from View shortcuts.

Alt+F1: Navigation pane (off, open, minimize)
Alt+F2: To-do bar (off, open, minimize)
Ctrl+F1: Ribbon (open, minimize) Can also double click on a tab to minimize or open the ribbon.

Note the several of the other status bar items are clickable: Reminders will show the reminder window, when Outlook is checking for mail, the Send/Receive button opens the Show progress dialog, the zoom % opens the Zoom dialog, and the Quota button opens the File tab.

Outlook 2010's Status Bar View Button was last modified: August 25th, 2014 by Diane Poremsky

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About Diane Poremsky

A Microsoft Outlook Most Valuable Professional (MVP) since 1999, Diane is the author of several books, including Outlook 2013 Absolute Beginners Book. She also created video training CDs and online training classes for Microsoft Outlook. You can find her helping people online in Outlook Forums as well as in the Microsoft Answers and TechNet forums.

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Lynda
August 9, 2016 5:36 am

Dear all

When using 'Bottom Reading Pane' View , I have all the following fields: FROM, SUBJECT, RECEIVED, SIZE, CATEGORY. But when I use the 'Right Reading Pane' View,I don't have the fields above, what should I do to have those fields when using 'Right Reading Pane'. Thanks

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Diane Poremsky
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Reply to  Lynda
August 9, 2016 10:48 am

you have them but the compact view hides them. If you slide the reading pane to the right, making the message list wider, it will switch from compact view to the same view used with the bottom pane. You can adjust the @ of pixels needed to switch between compact and line view in View Settings, Other Settings. Default is around 100, depending on your version of outlook.

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Kay Malm
August 25, 2014 1:09 pm

I would like to turn off the Customize Status Bar when open an attachment in Word 2013. It is a nuisance. Document always opens as a read-only.

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Diane Poremsky
Reply to  Kay Malm
September 29, 2014 9:28 pm

To open attachments in read/write mode, you need to open the email message and go to Edit message. Or disable reading pane preview. FWIW, its not really recommended to open the attachments in edit mode - it's too easy to lose changes if you don't do a save as.
https://www.slipstick.com/outlook/outlook-2010/edit-and-save-outlook-2010-attachments/

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Janie
May 19, 2014 11:49 am

Is it possible to run a report for customer service reps, showing the total emails and unread emails - information on status bar

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Diane Poremsky
Reply to  Janie
May 22, 2014 2:51 pm

Writing to the status bar is more difficult and I'm not 100% sure it can be done in current versions of Outlook; you need to use windows functions.

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Mike
January 16, 2014 9:59 am

Is it possible to just turn the status bar off entirely? We used to be able to do that but in 2010 that option seems to be gone. Any suggestions?

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Diane Poremsky
Reply to  Mike
January 16, 2014 5:44 pm

No. You can right click on it and turn everything off, leaving just the connection status and send/receive status, but you can't remove it completely.

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