Microsoft Office

If “out of sight, out of mind” ever causes you to miss messages or assignments, Favorite Folders may have a solution. Located at the top of the Navigation Pane, this folder list provides a place to keep your most important e-mail folders, right where they can catch your attention. Find out how you can customize, minimize, or even remove Favorite Folders.

From Office Hours: Consider Favorite Folders a desktop “real estate” bargain
If you consider your desktop real estate highly valuable and tend to clear away all “clutter,” you may be pleasantly surprised by the way that Favorite Folders are displayed in the minimized Navigation Pane … less ends up being more.

Besides the main Navigation Pane button, only the folders in Favorite Folders appear as vertical folder buttons in the minimized Navigation Pane. (A click of one of these vertical buttons opens up that folder’s messages in your main Outlook window. Click the Sent Items button, for example, and you’ll see a list of the messages you’ve sent recently.) When you click a folder button in the minimized Navigation Pane, you see a list of the mail items in that folder. So if you put your most important folders in Favorite Folders, you can quickly open them from the vertical buttons in the minimized Navigation Pane anytime you are working in Mail view, while still maximizing your desktop real estate.

Customize the minimized Navigation Pane to display your most important folders
The number of Favorite Folders that you can display in the minimized Navigation Pane is mainly limited by size:

The size of the vertical space in the minimized Navigation Pane
The size of the text in the folder names in Favorite Folders

Generally, you can customize the minimized Navigation Pane to display two to four folder buttons. This means you may need to prioritize and rearrange the folders in Favorite Folders according to which ones you want to see. (You might need to shorten their folder names, too.) Check out the instructions below so that you can experiment for yourself.

If you’ve given Favorite Folders a chance and still don’t like it…
Here’s how to minimize or remove Favorite Folders (if you must).

Minimize Favorite Folders
You can minimize and expand Favorite Folders as needed, making your folders available when you want them, and keeping them out of the way when you don’t.

In the Favorite Folders header, click the arrow.

To expand Favorite Folders, click the arrow again.
Remove Favorite Folders from the Navigation Pane
Removing Favorite Folders does not affect the folders in the list. If you have folders listed in Favorite Folders when you turn the feature off, those folders will be there when you turn it back on again. (Apparently hope remains! Hope that someday you will reconsider using Favorite Folders … and if you do, it will faithfully have kept your folders handy.)

On the View menu, point to Navigation Pane, and click Favorite Folders to uncheck it.
Click Favorite Folders again to turn the feature back on.

But before taking the drastic action of removing Favorite Folders, give it a try. See if the combination of quick access to your high priority folders and screen space savings makes it a valuable addition to your Outlook window. Be a “Favorite hater” no more!