COLOR ME ORGANIZED

In Outlook 2000 and 2002 you can colorize your appointments; this can be handy to visually group certain types of events.

 Coloring appointments can be tied to Outlook categories and that's the most       efficient way to use them.

Both methods will be discussed.

SIMPLE LABELS

Open up your Outlook calendar and choose Edit | Labels | Edit Labels

You'll see a list of colors plus text labels like:

Important, Business, Personal, Must Attend and so on.

Don't be afraid to change the labels to suit your needs.

These are only suggestions to get you started.

The colors are fixed to the list you have and there

are no additional labels / colors available.

COLORING BY CATEGORY

Categories apply to all Outlook items (email, contacts

etc) not just appointments so the label you use for

appointments   have some consistency with the rest of Outlook.

First you have to setup categories.  As with simple labels you have to work out how you'd like to classify your life.  That's up to you.

You may have two jobs and want to use categories to keep the two separate.  Just one 'Personal' may not be enough and social butterflies may want to have categories for friends and family.  It is your call and you can change the categories at any time.

You’ll want to heavily edit the   default 'Master Category List' that comes with Outlook.  Five categories should be sufficient.

Once you have your preferred categories setup, it is much easier to tag any Outlook item correctly.  Right click on an appointment, choose Categories then check the ones you want.

Now you can link one or more of the categories to colored labels.  From the Calendar view go to Edit | Automatic Formatting, this is a specialized version of the rules dialog box so you may be familiar with some parts of it.

From this dialog box you can link the colored labels to any criteria you wish.  I find Categories to be the most useful, but you could try colorizing by appointment location or name etc (but you have to ensure the appointments are entered consistently for that to work).

Click on the Add button and give the new formatting rule a name (I use the category name for convenience) and choose a color.

Then click on Condition | More Choices and then the Categories button.  Choose the category you want linked to   that color.

You can do that for each category and color you wish.  For simplicity I go to Edit Labels and change the simple labels   so they match the category names, though remember that the   simple labels / colors won't affect categories even if they   have the same name.

Coloring appointments has nothing to do with colorizing incoming messages (remember when I said this feature was inconsistent?).  But if you use Categories then you could use the same color to highlight messages with the same

category tag. Just another reason to use Categories rather than the simple labels.

Pity that coloring hasn't been applied across Outlook.

Tasks and notes can be linked to categories (that can be useful too) but no way to color them.