Outlook: Lost the preview pane and minimized to the title bar only

Something went askew with my Outlook — I only had a title bar when minimized, so had to maximize the window to see my emails. And instead of getting a list of emails with a preview of each in the lower part of the screen as I clicked on each one, I could only get the list of emails OR the current email fully displayed, not how I had it before. I don’t know what happened or why, but I was able to solve both issues with a bit of Googling.

Resize the Outlook window

I could maximize the window fully, but when I restored the window size it went to just a title bar. I could drag a handle to make the title bar wider or narrower, but I couldn’t pull down the corners to display the window.

Solution: Drag the title bar to either the right or left edge of the window. You get a ghost outline of the new window dimensions, so release the mouse. You should now have a workable window you can resize to your requirements.

Restore the Preview pane

No matter what I set in Outlook’s View tab > Reading Pane settings, I could only get either ALL my emails listed (with the unread ones showing about 3 lines of the email) , or get a single email listed with the details of the sender in the lower half of the window. My usual way of viewing emails is a single line list on the right (whether read or not; #1 in the screenshot below), a preview of the email in the middle part of the screen (#2), and the sender’s details and other communications in the lower part of the screen (#3). No matter what I set, I couldn’t get my usual view back.

I found the solution that worked for me here: http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/198544-outlook-reading-pane-turns-off-each-time-outlook-is-closed

In case this webpage ever goes missing, here’s what to do:

1. Close Outlook.
2. From the Start button (I’m using Windows 7, so vary this for the version of Windows you’re running), type Run then click the Run program.
3. In the Open field on the Run dialog box, type outlook.exe /cleanviews (Note: there’s a space after exe but no other spaces).
4. Click OK.
5. If this works for you as it did for me, Outlook should reopen with your preview pane back as it was. Adjust the heights of the preview pane elements to suit.

2016 blog statistics

Sometime towards the end of 2016, this blog hit 9 million views since I started blogging in 2008! Some 1.75 million views occurred just in 2016. These figures don’t include any visits I made to my own blog (yes, I use my own blog for stuff I can’t remember!).

I wrote far fewer blog posts in 2016 (less than 30), so many of these visits were to posts I’ve written in previous years. I’ve written 1715 blog posts since 2008.

Surprisingly, I only have 528 subscribers (you can subscribe by clicking the ‘Sign me up!’ button on the right sidebar and entering your email address) who have signed up to receive email alerts each time I post a new article (and 779 Twitter followers for @cybertext), so I have to assume most readers are ‘hit and run’ readers — those who have a problem with Word or whatever, find one of my posts via Google etc., read the post, get what they came for (or not), and leave without checking out anything else.

Here are some graphs and tables for the 2016 statistics for this blog, as well as some comparative ones for ‘all time’ (‘all time’ is actually 2008 to 2016 — I started this blog very late in 2007, but didn’t really start posting until January 2008, so the 2007 statistics are so low as to be insignificant).

Total views by month/year

Average daily views

The average views per day started to decrease in 2016 (4777 per day) compared to 2015 (5533 per day). The graphs above and below are for the full seven days per week, though most views occur during the five business days of the working week, probably reflecting the need to find answers to Word questions and the like when people are stuck with a problem at work. Weekends and major public holidays (particularly in the US) see a noticeable drop in views.

Top 20 posts

Some posts are just more popular than others! Those 12 highlighted in blue appear in both lists — the top 20 posts of all time (2008-2016) on the left, and 2016 only on the right. Those without highlighting only appear in one of the top 20 lists. The numbers to the right of each title are the number of total views for that post in the time period.

Long tail

As expected, there’s a significant ‘long tail’ for this blog’s views. The top 20 posts (all have 20,000 views or more) garnered the most views. Everything else was a poor cousin to these top posts.

When I extracted out the views just for the top posts for 2008-2016 (i.e. >20,000 views each) and the top 20 for 2016 only (both below), the long tail was very evident. Again, the top 10 posts for all time garnered the most views, with posts 10 to 97 tailing off and flattening out. And for the 2016 view, the top five posts garnered the most views, then tapered off significantly after that.

 

So, there you have it. Nine years of blogging, 1714 blog posts published, and almost 9.2 million views (with 1.75 million of those in the past 12 months).

I guess I must be doing something right, even though the monetary return is close to zero. I pay an annual fee to WordPress to NOT show advertisements on this blog (I wouldn’t get any return from these even if I allowed them), and I refuse to try to ‘monetize’ my blog posts by hosting them elsewhere and running ads — I don’t like ads cluttering up and getting in the way of good content and potentially trapping readers into clicking on them, and I suspect my readers don’t like them either. Instead of ads, I have an option for readers to donate to this blog’s expenses if anything I’ve written has got them out of a bind, saved them time (and therefore money), or helped them be more efficient. In 2016 I received perhaps the equivalent of one hour’s paid work in donations… I use that money to pay my annual bill to WordPress to keep this blog free of ads and to have the convenience of adjusting the style (CSS) of this blog.

As in 2016, I’ll be writing posts sporadically in 2017 — I still have a day job that I’m committed to, and paid work always comes before unpaid work.

See also:

• 2015 blog stats: https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2016/01/01/2015-blog-statistics/
• 2014 blog stats: https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2015/01/01/2014-blog-statistics/
• 2013 blog stats: https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2013/12/31/2013-blog-statistics/
• 2012 blog stats: https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/2012-blog-statistics/
• 2011 blog stats: https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/2011-blog-statistics/
• 2010 blog stats: https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/2010-blog-statistics/
• 2009 blog stats: https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/revisiting-another-year-of-blogging/
• 2008 blog stats: https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/01/04/looking-back-on-the-first-year-of-this-blog/

[Links last checked January 2017]