One of the great features in Office Outlook 2010 is the social feature, aka the People Pane.  The People Pane does look very promising. (IE: Tracks Social Activities from RSS Feeds, Twitter , Recent Conversations, Status Updates, Calendar Items, Attachments, etc. from the selected contact.)  Since the product is in Beta and not fully working it does take up A LOT of room especially if you’ve enabled the preview pane.  With that in mind, let’s get rid of it!   Who knows, perhaps when a few of the social networking plug-ins become available for Outlook 2010 the People Pane will be more useful.   Until then, if minimizing the People Pane isn’t good enough (just Click the Down arrow on the right-side of it) you always have the option to disable it completely.

  Wow, what a space hog, let’s disable it!   How To Remove The Annoying People Pane From Outlook 2010 Emails   1.   Click the View tab, then Click the People Pane button.  From the People Pane menu, Click the Off option.

  Viola, that was a simple solution and one more annoyance marked off the list!  We can always come back later and re-enable it if we decide to use the Outlook 2010 People Pane. Personally I keep it minimized. What about the preview pane? Do you keep it on the bottom, right or disabled? I have a 23″ monitor, so I have a lot of real estate to use up. At this point, I haven’t had a need for the people pane yet as I do not work in a big office environment anymore where I think is where that would come in handy most of the time. Especially with Exchange, people pictures and information would probably be auto-populated. People Pane, I think its nice. LIke Izzmo said, I do work in a large office so it’s very handing to have the other details. The Social aspects of it are still limited (Sharepoint only) but I personally leave it open. Still, good article groovyDexter! -MrGroove I have now decided to remove it completely… Any help in totally eliminating this from Outlook 2010 would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. I have windows search turned off because I STILL use the wonderful Google Desktop which works far faster so the pain did not work for me anyway and displayed nothing. Can someone please verify for me that this has happened? That is, when I look at the email I sent to my client, it appears that he can open and read all the old emails that Outlook attached? Or is that view only on my PC? This is a very urgent issue for my company. To turn off the People Pane, go to View, People Pane, select Off. Thanks a lot! 1.Click the File tab. 2.Click Options. 3.Click Contacts. 4.Select or clear the Show user photographs when available (requires restarting Outlook). 5.Click OK. 6.Exit and then restart Outlook. What I don’t know how to do is to get rid of the lousy photo of myself that shows up in other people’s emails… (I can’t be that old!) Our IT department controls that, I’m afraid. A classic Microsoft moment: “Where’d that come from? What is it? How do I get rid of it?” Cheers, Robb But I do have the stupid pane at the bottom. Any ideas? Finally, I found your article. Many thanks! I did not knew the proper name for this annoying pane and always minimised it, but it tends to jump around and sometimes occasionally expand. I don’t want lots of confusing panes and columns, I want a simple and readible presentation on screen without confusing and annoying information I did not asked for and don’t use. I don’t want mysterious and confusing features turned on by default, they should all be off and maybe be possible to turn on if the end user requests it and has an active interest of this type of information. So your contribution, although simple, was of great value to me. Axel Method #1 The first method available simple turns off the People Pane so that it does not display when reviewing your emails in Outlook. •In Outlook, click on the View tab •Click on People Pane •Select Off from the drop down menu Method #2 The second option is to disable Outlook’s Social Connector Add-in altogether. This too will remove the People Pane from displaying. •In Outlook, click on the File tab and then select Options. •In the Outlook Options dialog box that appears, select Add-Ins from the left-hand menu. •Click the Go button at the bottom of the screen. •Uncheck the box next to Microsoft Outlook Social Connector and then click on OK. So, it shows me stuff that I can already see elsewhere… ????!!! The person it is from, and the people on the distribution are visible in the preview pane. And I can see who an email is from in the inbox list. Honestly, the people writing these program are the most counter-intuitive developers I’ve ever been exposed to. What’s really sad is that corporations won’t move to Linux because their is no “support” in community based environments… except I have NEVER, EVER, EVER gotten a solution from anyone on the MS community forums. It’s always someone else’s fault, a bug somewhere else, or they just completely ignore my issues. Comment Name * Email *

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