In this lecture, we're going to cover contextual tabs. In contrast to core tabs, which contain various common commands that are relevant regardless of action. Contextual tabs typically contain one or more commands that are applicable to a selected or highlighted item only. For instance, the group tools group tab appears when you've selected a group email, it gives you the commands to do anything from editing the group to check in the group calendar. So as you can see, I've highlighted a group email. When I come to the top I've got my group tools and the contextual tab group.

So let's go ahead and click on the group tab. Once we do that, we're going to see we can create a new conversation. We've got our sample group area and sample group is the name of the group itself. We can do our membership from here add new members, edit our group, create a conversation to calendar items, files and notebook from here, and we could also come over and create a new group from here So that's just one example of a contextual tab. Let's go back to our inbox. Another contextual tab that's available is under our compose tools.

And it's the message tab. If we have a draft email, so let's go to our draft folder. Click on a draft email, you'll see we've got our compose tools, and our message contextual tab. This is going to give us all the options we need to compose our message. We can copy and paste information. From here, we can do our basic formatting, add attachments, at our signature, change the importance of it, and add our BCC and add our from field as well.

So that's all the information that's available within the contextual tab message from the Compose group, and it only becomes available when you're working within the message. We'll go back to our inbox. Another contextual tab that we have available is our search. So if we click within the search area, we get our search tools search contextual tab, and that's because we came up Up here, and we clicked in the search box. Once you do that, it's going to give you all the options available for creating your search. So we could refine our search from here, we can tell it what we want to look for Microsoft.

We can refine our search, does it have attachments? Does it have a specific category? Do we want only important messages if they were sent to certain people, unread messages and so forth, we get all these options from our search contextual tab. Let's go to our calendar and click on an appointment. This is going to take us into our appointment contextual tab. Now this one comes up appointments series because this is a recurring appointment I have so there's the appointment contextual tab and an appointment series contextual tab, depending on if it's a recurring or one time only appointment.

And from here we have our options available the actions do we want to forward this to somebody else do we want to invite attendees do we want to make meeting notes because it's a recurring one We can change the recurrence of it. And because it is an appointment, we can tell it Do we want it to be show as free change a reminder, notice categorize it and so forth. If we come down to my noon meeting, that's going to change to a meeting contextual tab, because that's actually a meeting, other people are attending it as well. And again, it's a recurring appointment. So we've got this series added to the contextual tab. If it was just a one time meeting, it would say meeting for the contextual tab, and it's going to give you the ability on this contextual tab to do similar things as the appointment contextual tab.

You can cancel the meeting from here forward it add MIDI notes, attend to remove attendees, you could track the information for who's attending and not show as busy or free change a reminder, notice the recurrence information and so forth from here. So these are some of the contextual tabs that become available depending on what you're working on within Outlook. The next lecture for this course will go over the key tips.