The Outlook To-Do bar is a great addition to Outlook 2010 (and 2007), it shows you the appointment(s) for the day, your task list and easily lets you navigate to future dates to see your upcoming event.
What makes it better is that you can easily customize it i.e. turn on or off the information to Display on the To-D0 Bar. Here is how…
Note: the instructions below are only for Outlook 2010 unless specifically mentioned.
- In any Outlook folder, click on the View tab > in the Layout group click To-Do Bar
- The information that is currently being displayed in the To-Do bar will be TICKED, to hide any item, simply click on it again and it will get untick.
Now only the items which are ticked will be displayed in the To-Do bar.
Apart from customizing what gets displayed or not displayed on the To-Do bar, you can also customize the individual items such as increasing or decreasing the number of appointments or task which can be displayed on the To-Do bar.
But note that when you increase the information to display for one item, it decreases the number of items for the other. Here you need to prioritize what information you need to be aware of more often, your appointments or tasks:
- Simply move your cursor on the To-Do bar between the Appointments and Tasks list
- When your cursor changes to an arrow like image, drag the bar up or down to increase/decrease the number of items to display.
I hope you find this tip useful in organizing your workday.
Do you have suggestions for any other customization in Outlook?
Share it with our readers and us by leaving a comment below.
I would like to have an explanation on how the search fields work in Outlook. I’d like to know the proper syntax for searching for 2 words together, or 2 words seperatately etc. I know the several keywords.. but not all of them for sure. Can you help with that?
hasattachments:yes
received:last week
category:=”Projects”
to:info
read:no
@David Carwell
Here is a link to a post we did earlier on using Outlook search:
https://blog.standss.com/index.php/human-friendly-power-searches-in-outlook-2007-2010/
Also if you are looking for a better way to search emails in Outlook using keywords (tags), you can check out our addin EmailTags for Outlook.
http://standssapps.com/emailtags/default.html
Would like a way to suppress the listing of flagged eMails in the ToDo bar.
Fine if it is there for those who want it, and maybe I might like it later, so it needs a toggle, so it can be on or off. My reason is I don’t consider reading an eMail to be a ToDo task and the huge number of them overwhelms the list. I’ve had to inverse the list so my actual tasks do show up. It says POSTS on top versus MESSAGES on top.
I would like a way to suppress messages showing up, but have a way to bring them back if needed for the search function.
I see it’s value for work people who have emails relating just to work tasks so they do become issues to follow up on.