When you want to arrange your information in a specific way, create your own view. A view is the type of data displayed and the way it's arranged in an Outlook folder. If you frequently search and sort your data to find the same information, create a view and save it to use again. For example, if you regularly search through your e-mail messages to compile a monthly status report, instead of searching, filter for the information you want, and then save the resulting view to use each month. The views you save are added to the View menu, so one click provides you with the exact information you want.

You can get the exact information you want because with views, you can instantly extract a subset of information from any folder. For example, if your Contacts folder contains several hundred customers, you can use filtering to create a view that will show only the customers from a particular city, grouped by postal code and sorted by the last time they were contacted. In the illustration below, the contacts have been filtered to show only those from the city of Portland, grouped by postal code and sorted by the last time they were contacted.

Each folder in Outlook comes with several views. For example, the Inbox folder comes with nine views. The default view is Message view, which shows messages' senders and subjects, sorted by the date and time the messages were received. You can easily change this view by clicking the View menu, pointing to Current View, and then clicking another of the standard views or a view you've created.

For more information about creating your own filtered views, type change view in the Office Assistant or on the Answer Wizard tab in the Help window, and then click Search.