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Microsoft Outlook 2010 Tutorials
Replying and Forwarding E-mail / Customizing Categories
Subtitles of the Movie (Microsoft Outlook 2010 / Replying and Forwarding E-mail / Customizing Categories)
When it comes to color coding or categorizing your messages you can simply use the color-named Categories that appear by default when you use the Categorize button on the Home tab, as I'm showing you here, or by right-clicking a message and choosing Categorize and then making a selection, or by right-clicking in the Categories column and using the quick pop-up. Now this list of generic color names might be sufficient. Some people only ever just apply Red Category to urgent messages and they don't worry about the fact that it says Red Category. The color is all they need. But there's a lot of potential for making this a very personalized, useful list of colors and you can add more than these six colors, so you can have lots more colors. You can change the name and so you can create a lot of different Categories to help you visually identify your messages and, as I've mentioned, this same Category list can be applied to appointments and events in your Calendar so this has a lot of potential for usefulness. Now I'm going to back out of this little pop-up menu and let's talk about how to customize this list. If you go to Categorize or, as I said, right-clicking the messages, from the menu you can choose All Categories and this opens the Color Categories dialog box and here we see our generic list of colors - Blue, Green, Orange, Purple, Red, Yellow. And we can customize them, we can rename them as you see on the right, we can add New categories, we can Delete categories, we can change the Color of a category and we can apply Shortcut Keys. Let's start by adding a new Category. I'm going to click on New and I'm going to give it a name and I'm going to call it Personal and then I'm going to choose a color and notice you have way more colors than your six that you start out with. We have a choice of up to 20 different colors and I'm going to choose Dark Maroon. As you mouse over them it gives you the name and choose Dark Maroon. I could apply a Shortcut Key choosing from these Ctrl and Function key combinations. It's only really useful for Categories you're going to apply frequently, so I'm going to leave this set to None and click OK and now I have a new Category. Now if I want to rename a Category - let me remove the checkbox so I don't accidentally apply another setting to this particular Category - let's say I want to rename one. I'm going to click on Orange Category and just choose Rename. Notice the name that it has now is highlighted and I'm just going to call it Training. So this could be applied to messages that pertain to training as well as to training events that I might add to my Calendar and you'll learn to apply those in the Calendar in another lesson. Once you've finished typing the name, press the Enter key to commit and you've renamed your Category. To Delete a Category, for example I'll click on Yellow and hit Delete, it prompts you to make sure that's what you want to do and if you really do want to delete it click Yes. Now let's say you want to change the color of a Category, so for example, I'll click on Training and I'm going to go over here to the Color option and pick a different color. Now it's not a good idea to choose a color that's already up here so let's choose something else, something drastically different. I'm going to choose Dark Yellow and now that becomes the color for Training. I could change the color for Personal. You can apply a Shortcut Key just to a Category so, for example, if I rename Purple and we'll call this Birthdays and let's say I want to be able to apply that quickly I'll just choose a keyboard shortcut. So, Birthdays, or the Purple Category's been renamed and it's had a Shortcut Key assigned. So we've seen how to create a New Category, how to Rename an existing Category, how to change the color of a Category and how to apply a keyboard Shortcut. Once you've customized the list - and we've only done a partial job here - you'll click OK and then that list will be available when you choose Categorize, either from the Home tab or by right-clicking a message. So for example, this one pertains to Training so I'll apply the Training Category here. And now the word Training appears in the Categories column and across the top of the message. If I were in my Calendar and I was putting in an appointment to do some training or to attend some training I could then use the same set of Categories and apply the appropriate one. So there's a lot of potential here for customizing the list and making it a very person and useful list of Categories and now you know how to go in and take all those generic colors and then turn them into a list that makes sense for you.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Microsoft Outlook 2010 |
| Author: | Laurie Ulrich Fuller |
| SKU: | 34166 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-54-2 |
| Release Date: | 2010-10-05 |
| Duration: | 7 hrs / 89 lessons |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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