With so many email messages arriving at our inbox every day,
it can be easy to miss those messages that are high priority or things that we
want to respond to more quickly.
Microsoft Outlook includes a variety of ways for us to organize and prioritize
our messages.
Let's look at how we can highlight important or priority messages through the
use of Conditional Formatting.
Here you'll see that I have some messages from the Big Boss.
Now in a typical inbox,
these could be easily mixed up with many other messages that are just flowing in
through Outlook.
But I'd like these to stand out.
To set up Conditional Formatting,
go to the View tab.
Now this is where we can customize and change our view of our inbox.
From here,
we'll choose View Settings.
And you may want to explore this so that you can customize what columns are
displayed,
how your information is sorted or filtered and other settings.
But our focus right now is Conditional Formatting.
This is where you can see,
for instance,
why unread messages will show up as bold in blue.
So know that you can change that,
if you'd like to have a different display or preference.
To highlight the important messages from the Big Boss,
first we'll choose Add.
Next,
we'll name this rule.
Use something that's descriptive so it's easier for you to come back to that
later.
There are two things that you'll want to do here.
The first is how do you want your message to change in appearance?
So Conditional Formatting is based upon a condition.
We want the formatting or the appearance to be different.
And so here I'll choose font,
select something bigger.
Now I'm going regular dramatic here just for demonstration purposes.
I could also change the font style.
I'll change the color so we can see it stand out.
Once again for demonstration,
we'll make that red.
Pick from any of the options that are available to you.
Once you've set up that formatting,
select OK,
but you're not done yet because we also need to set up the condition,
that is,
what are the circumstances where this font will be applied.
We choose condition and then set those conditions or criteria.
In this case,
it will be a specific email address but you could dig into the filter and it
could be something that perhaps is in the subject line or in the body of the
message.
That is what will be helpful here.
Now that we have the email address I'll simply OK,
OK,
and watch what happens when I finish this up.
So now these will really pop,
stand out,
and if I haven't been in my inbox all day long or just even went to a meeting
and was gone for a couple hours,
I can spot that these might be my top priority responses.
If you have a lot of conditions,
then the value of Conditional Formatting will be diluted,
but this might be a way for you to flag those key messages from your top client,
from a supervisor or some other email that's coming in that you want to make
sure has top priority.
Where can you use Conditional Formatting in Microsoft Outlook to highlight those
important messages?
For other tips and techniques in Outlook,
head to TheSoftwarePro.com/Outlook and subscribe to this channel for other time
saving software tips.
This is Dawn Bjork,
The Software Pro.
Thanks for watching!