Finding Items in MS Outlook's Reading Pane

Yesterday, I wanted to sort the 4,000 messages in my Deleted folder by the To field. Now, that field is, by default, not in the reading pane and so I added it, at least I thought I did, but it still didn't appear.

Using the Arrange By option to sort by the To field didn't prove useful if I couldn't see the actual To items. The problem wasn't in Outlook.

Outlook had actually added the To field to the reading pane. I just couldn't see it, because it had been added to the far right. In other words, the To field wasn't visible, but it was there. After a fashion, I eventually found the To field and dragged it to the left where it was now visible.

Just remember that we should not ever get comfortable with just what we see in Outlook -- there is usually always something that isn't visible. If you know it should be there, but you don't see it, you now know that the first place you should look is off-screen.

The best solution is to arrange your panes to avoid this problem by deleting fields and panes you don't need to free up space for the items you do, but that can be very tedious and sometimes impossible.

Your best bet is to right-click any column title and choose Field Chooser from the context menu. In this manner, you can add fields much more quickly, as opposed to running down through the menu commands, which plant the fields several clicks deep into the hierarchy.

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