Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Isn’t it a pain having to categorize individual appointments, just so that they appear in another color on your calendar?

• Wouldn’t it be awesome if an appointment that had the word “todo” in it, automatically turned YELLOW?
• Wouldn’t it be great if an appointment that had the word “drivetime” in it automatically turned BLUE?
• Wouldn’t it be slick if an appointment that had the word “Live Meeting” in the location field automatically turned RED?
• Wouldn’t it also be slick if an appointment that had the word “Conference Call” or “your company’s conference call number” in the location field automatically turned ORANGE?
• Wouldn’t it be swell if an appointment that had the word “vacation” in it automatically turned GREEN?

With this trick, you’ll never have to manually color code any appointment.  With just the content of the appointment, Outlook will automatically color code it for you without any intervention on your part.

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HOWTO: Automatically color code appointments in your calendar based on keywords in the Subject
(This is written for Outlook 2010 in mind, but will also work for Outlook 2007 with slightly different instructions)

• Open your Outlook Calendar
• Click the View Menu item
• Click the “View Settings” button under Current View
• Click the “Conditional Formatting” button
• Click the “Add” button to create a new rule for auto-coloring appointments
• Enter the name of the rule in the “Name:” text box
• Select a color in the “Color:” drop down list box
• Click the “Condition…” button to identify the conditions under which this color should be applied
• Select the “Appointments and Meetings” tab and enter a keyword into the “Search for the word(s):” text box to look for a word in the Subject field
• Select the “Advanced” tab, select the “Field” drop down list box, select “Frequently-used fields” and “Location” and enter a keyword into the “Value” field to search for content in the “Location” field in the appointment.
• Click OK, OK, OK to apply your new formatting rule.
  Rules are applied immediately, and if they worked, you should see your appointments light up with color.

Personally, at Microsoft, I created rules for myself around the following:

• Drivetime
• Concalls
• Hotel check in
• Flights
• Vacation
• Todo
• “Live Meeting” (in the Location field)
• “Conference Call” (in the Location field)
• Conference Call (searching for our company’s outbound concall # in the Location field)