Accessing the Mini Toolbar in Outlook is the easiest way to apply formatting to text in your email messages. Microsoft Outlook provides a Mini Toolbar that allows users to quickly format text while composing an email. The Mini Toolbar appears when a user selects some text, making it easy to change the font type and size, create bulleted lists, indent text, and other formatting options. You can’t customize the Mini Toolbar, but it comes preloaded with more than enough formatting tools for most users’ needs.
In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to access the Mini Toolbar in Microsoft Outlook.
Activating the Mini Toolbar
To activate the Mini Toolbar, select some text in the body of your message by double clicking on a word. To select multiple words, hold down the left mouse button and drag the mouse pointer across words, sentences, or entire paragraphs.
The Mini Toolbar appears and hovers above the selected text.
Select an option from the toolbar. We’ll choose the Underline tool to draw a line underneath the selected text.
The selected text is now underlined. Moving the mouse pointer away from the toolbar hides it.
Experiment with the different tools available on the Mini Toolbar. There are many different options available to format the text in your email messages, including indenting, creating numbered and bulleted lists, applying bold type, italics, applying different colors, changing the font size and type, and a lot more.
If you find it annoying or distracting, you can turn the toolbar off so that it doesn’t pop up every time some text is selected.
How to Turn Off the Mini Toolbar
- Click File on the Message screen or the Home screen.
- Click Options in the left navigation pane.
- In the Outlook Options dialog box, with the General tab selected, look under the User Interface Options section and uncheck Show Mini Toolbar on selection.
- Click Ok.
To turn the Mini Toolbar back on, follow steps 1 through 4 above, and make sure the Show Mini Toolbar on selection box is checked.
Follow the steps outlined above to easily access the Mini Toolbar in Microsoft Outlook. Use the toolbar to quickly format text and make your emails look the way you want. And if you find the Mini Toolbar distracting or unnecessary, it’s easy to turn it off as detailed above.