Panels

Introduction

Opera's panels, enabled by pressing F4 or by clicking on the panels icon on the left side of the status bar, give you quick access to your bookmarks, contacts, browsing history, and more.

Bookmarks

All your bookmarks can be accessed and managed in the Bookmarks panel. If you have a large selection of bookmarks, use the "Quick find" field to quickly retrieve what you are looking for.

Web panels

You can also display a site in the panel itself, which is called a "web panel". To add the currently displayed page as a web panel:

1. Select Bookmarks > Bookmark Page.
2. Make sure that the “Create In” field shows the Bookmarks folder.
3. Click the “Details” button.
4. Click “Show in panel”, then “OK”.
5. In your panels, you'll see a new icon for this page, which when selected, displays page content in the panel.

Some webpages provide special links (rel="sidebar") that make it easy to add webpages as panels.

Example: Create a panel with the Google news site

Learn more about bookmarks

History

Opera's history panel keeps a list of webpages that you have recently visited. In Opera's History preferences, you can choose how many addresses to keep track of.

Tip: If you recall having visited an interesting site, but forgot to bookmark it, use the "Find" field in the History panel to locate it.

Click history entries to open them in the current tab, or hold Shift while clicking to open the entry in a new tab.

Mail

This panel is only available if you have set up an email account.

Learn more about Opera's news and email client

Contacts

Create contacts and store email addresses, telephone numbers, chat nicknames, and postal addresses. This panel is only available if you have email and/or chat enabled.

Operation	How to do it
Create new contact	Click "Add"
Create folder for group of contacts	Click the drop-down arrow on the "Add" button, select "New folder"
Show messages associated with contact	Click contact
Make contact available at all times	Drag contact to any toolbar

Contact properties

Press Alt+Enter to:

• Edit selected contact's name, email address, home page address, chat nickname, postal address, and phone numbers.
• Write down notes about the contact.
• Select a picture (about 60x50 pixels) that you would like to associate with the contact.
• Select a small icon you would like to have displayed next to messages from the contact.

Tip: If you type the word "party" in the "Notes" field of your best friends, you can later type "party" in the "Quick find" field to find all those people, then drag and drop them into an email to send a party invitation.

Downloads

Opera's download panel lets you monitor and control downloads to your computer.

Operation	How to do it
Download file linked to from a webpage	Click the link to the file or drag the link to the "Quick download" field
Download file	Enter file address in the "Quick download" field
Resume, stop, or restart download of selected files	Click "Resume", "Stop", or "Restart"
Sort list of files	Click column headers

Note: Not all websites support resuming of downloads.

Read more about downloads

Notes

The Notes panel can serve as a clipboard manager, a "to do" list, a template archive, and much more.

Read more about notes

Links

The links panel extracts all links in the current webpage so you can easily find images, music, video clips, zip files and other downloads, as well as links to other pages.

Example: Type "mp3" in the "Quick find" field to find all mp3 files on the page.

Tip: Click the "Lock" button to keep the current list of links even if you browse to other pages.

Info

The Info panel displays technical information about the current webpage.

Search

The Search panel contains search possibilities for various search engines and online services.

Windows panel

The Windows panel contains a tree-structured, clickable view of your open tabs and application windows.

Panel setup

To customize your panel setup, go to Appearance > Panels, or right-click a panel and select "Customize".

From the list of available panels, select which ones to display and which ones to hide. Note that the "Mail", "Chat", and "Contacts" options will be grayed out if the relevant account has not been set up.

You can also select whether and where to display panels.