Get out of your Inbox with Outlook 2007 Name your color Tired of losing things in your Inbox? Want to be able to quickly spot messages from your boss or about a specific topic? Use color to instantly organize and sort your mail. With colored categories, you can make specific messages more visible—even if all you do is leave them in your Inbox. Categories and their associated colored labels let you quickly see what’s what in a way that makes sense to you.

Get out of your Inbox with Outlook 2007 Organize messages with color If you’re working on a special project, you can make messages about the project easier to find later. Just mark all related messages with a color-coded category. The picture shows a few color-coded messages: Green is for messages about Coho Winery, and yellow is for messages about Contoso.

Get out of your Inbox with Outlook 2007 Organize messages with color If you’re working on a special project, you can make messages about the project easier to find later. Just mark all related messages with a color-coded category. The picture shows a few color-coded messages: A message can be color coded with multiple colors if it applies to more than one account, as the selected message does. You’ll also see colored categories and their names in the Reading Pane.

Get out of your Inbox with Outlook 2007 How to assign a category Wondering who creates the category names? You do. You create a category name and choose the color that’s associated with it. Then, you can assign that category to incoming and existing messages. One way to assign a color category to a message is to right-click in the Categories column and use the shortcut menu, as shown in the picture.

Get out of your Inbox with Outlook 2007 How to assign a category Wondering who creates the category names? You do. You create a category name and choose the color that’s associated with it. Once you’ve assigned a category to a message, you can quickly scan your Inbox and find the message just by looking for its colored tag.

Get out of your Inbox with Outlook 2007 How to match names and colors Outlook categories start with unspecific names: Red Category, Orange Category, etc. Naturally, categories will have the most meaning if you give them specific names. The first time you use one of the default categories, such as the Purple Category, Outlook will prompt you to rename it using the Rename Category dialog box. You can type a new name for the category in the Name box, as shown in the picture.

Get out of your Inbox with Outlook 2007 Can’t remember what the color means? It happens to the best of us: We come up with a great system for staying organized, and then poof, we forget part of the system. Say, for example, that you used orange to color code all personal messages. Then, suppose you don’t get a personal message for a while, and you forget what orange means. No problem. As the picture shows, the decoder is a just a click away.

Get out of your Inbox with Outlook 2007 If you used colored flags in Outlook 2003… If you used colored follow-up flags in Outlook 2003, you’ll probably want to know why the new colored categories in Outlook 2007 are better. With colored categories, you can assign meaningful text at the same time that you assign a color. Another advantage is that colored categories can be applied to all Outlook items, so you can organize your contacts, calendar items, and tasks all in the same way.

Get out of your Inbox with Outlook 2007 If you used colored flags in Outlook 2003… If you color coded messages with flags in Outlook 2003, those flags will be updated automatically to colored categories. Here’s what you’ll see in Office Outlook 2007: In your Inbox, you’ll see a colored bar in the Categories column that’s the same color as the 2003 flag. When you open the message, you’ll see a color category name under the Subject line.

Get out of your Inbox with Outlook 2007 If you used colored flags in Outlook 2003… If you color coded messages with flags in Outlook 2003, those flags will be updated automatically to colored categories. A good practice would be to find these messages and give them a more meaningful category name.

Get out of your Inbox with Outlook 2007 View messages by category Let’s suppose you’ve color-coded all your messages according to specific projects or clients. How can you view your messages in these groups? It’s easy. Click the Arranged By shortcut menu (under the Search box), and then click Categories. The picture shows the switch from arranging messages by date to arranging them by their categories: Blue Yonder Airlines, Coho Winery, and Contoso.

Get out of your Inbox with Outlook 2007 Categories and rules, a great combination You can color-code messages automatically by using rules. For instance, are messages from your mom always personal? If you’ve got a Personal category set up, you can streamline categorization by creating a rule that automatically marks all messages from your mom with the Personal category.