Showing/Hiding Folders in Outlook for Mac: Activate Sidebar

After many searches I found this dialog box of Outlook> Preferences > General which is the most common search result for trying to figure out how to get the panel of folders and accounts to show up in Outlook for Mac. It ain’t it.

This button will do nothing meaningful for you. Well, actually it does — but you’re unlikely to turn it off by accident like you might do with the Sidebar.

Solution

What you want to do instead is go to View > Sidebar and turn it on. You’ll get it wrong if you think it has something to do with the Ribbon, or some control on the Ribbon, or some submenu of Panes, etc. Activate the Sidebar!

Do you have this problem where you can’t see all your folders? And don’t know where they went? And you’re spending tons of times trying to figure out how to bring them back?
There you go! It’s easy as a binary toggle on a menu. You just need to know what to look for and voila! I feel so much better now …

Why is this hard to get right? It’s because you need to know that the thing on the left-hand side is called the “sidebar” of course! And now you know it too! —JM

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