Outlook for Mac Updated to Support Full Screen View and Split View

Responding to customer requests, Microsoft has added support for Mac OS X’s Full Screen View and Split View features to Outlook 2016 for Mac. The firm says that the additions will help customers manage multiple email messages more easily.

Full Screen View

Outlook 2016 supports Full Screen View on Mac OS X Yosemite and newer. If you’re not familiar with this feature, supported apps usually have a Full Screen button in the window corner, or you can use CTRL + CMD + F or a trackpad gesture to toggle it.

In Full Screen View, the app literally takes up the whole screen. So the system menu bar disappears, as does the Dock if normally visible. (You can still access both by mousing along the appropriate screen edge.) Here’s how Outlook 2016 looks in Full Screen View.

“By switching to Full Screen view, you can focus on incoming email messages in a distraction-free environment,” Microsoft notes.

Certain Outlook tasks utilize what’s called Focus View when you use Outlook in Full Screen View. So for example, when you open a new email or reply to an email, the message window appears over Outlook.

The app also supports tabs at the bottom of the display for each open window. So if you need to go back to the inbox when working on the message, you cna click outside the focus window, and the message will minimize to a tab at the bottom. That Tab bar lets you to navigate among the minimized messages, Microsoft explains.

Outlook 2016 also supports side-by-side view. This lets you do things like view two email messages side-by-side, and copy information between them as needed. Today, only two messages are supported, but Microsoft indicates it may increase this number in the future.

Split View

Finally, Outlook 2016 also supports the Mac OS X Split View feature, which is unique to OS X El Capitan. This means that you can split different Outlook modules—Mail and Calendar, say—onscreen and specify how much space each gets.

Support for Full Screen View and Split View is available in the January update for Office 2016 for Mac, Microsoft says. You can learn more from the Office web site.