One of the nicest features in Outlook is the way the list view handles “Compact Mode” when you use the reading pane on the right-hand side of the screen… it switches to double-line to show more information easily. But did you know that you can actually make it display even more fields?

This is really useful if you want to be able to see a particular extra field at a glance. The latest version of Outlook lets you do color categories, but sometimes it’s easier to just see the textual version.

In the main Outlook screen click on View \ Current View \ Customize Current View.

In the Customize View window click on Fields.

Now the Show Fields screen opens and here is where you can add or remove fields, or choose the order the fields will be displayed.

The key thing to note in the Show Fields dialog is the “Maximum number of lines in compact mode”… for instance here I changed it to display 4 lines:

The interesting thing about this is that you can enable the view only for a particular folder or search folder, so you could easily switch between views on the same folder.