Discussion on:

Track your time better by automatically color coding your Outlook appointments

I have been using color coding in Outlook for years now - it is a big help. I had not considered using conditional formatting - I just did it manually. That may change now.

How do you keep yourself organized?

Hope you find this one useful. As for organized, I'm kind of the cobbler's kids, ya know? My desk is a mess. I do use a few rules and colors, but my favorite tool is an old paper calendar and a paper tablet where I write a to-do list daily. I just find the old ways work best for me, but I'm not collaborating and scheduling meetings all day the way truly busy people are!

I like the idea of colour coding my appointments. But that leaves meeting requests, incoming and outgoing, out of the loop.

I guess I would have to set up rules to assign categories to incoming and outgoing meeting requests.

I have been using categories for since they were introduced in Sheduler+ in about 1996, initially for contacts as I had about 1800 in my list at the time. Many contacts belong to more than one category, they are then easy to find by the context you are currently thinking in. The same categories are used for my appointments, here you have to remember that the colour assigned will be that of the last category assigned to the appointment. You can also create a view that lists appointments or contacts by category.

Susan: Thanks, this will be a real time saver. My wife adds appointments but does not color code them, so I have to go back, find them and color code them. Also, when I add an event from my Droid, I have to manually color code them. As usual, I learn a new feature of Office each time I read one of your articles.

I have gone through and done this as I like to categorize all of my appointments so I can see at a glance what is coming up. However, once I did the auto-coloring as described here, and stopped manually categorizing, I no longer see any colors in my "ToDo Bar" or right column. This appears to be because the colors are not actually categories and the ToDo Bar does not display colors, only categories. Any way around this? If not, I will have to go back to the manual assigning of categories.

I don't use the To Do Bar much so this trick to get coloring done simply by tyoing is very nice.

Thanks