How Conditional Formatting Highlight Emails In Outlook, when working on huge data, a single email can contain a lot. Not just that, even the emails themselves have various emails attached to them which makes it difficult to sort them out or hash them together.
In cases like these, where there are so many variables at play, one approach is to use conditional formatting in your Microsoft Outlook email client so as not to lose track of any given message within all of the attachments.
In this article, you will learn how to auto-highlight emails in Outlook based on a keyword.
What is a primary benefit of conditional formatting in Outlook?
Conditional formatting allows users to customize their Microsoft Office Outlook 2016 setup by making it more efficient.
You can apply rules to make your software increase its performance capabilities based on the information that you will mark as important or not, i.e., if someone is a particular signer or part of a certain deal.
It also allows you to have the data sent to specific folders by putting certain tags inside of each email’s subject line.
With conditional formatting, all your emails, calendar items, contacts and tasks can be arranged by color coding in Outlook directly without having to add a category or move them to different folders.
How To Automatically Highlight Emails in Outlook? [based on period]
Want to highlight emails based on a specific date range? Use conditional formatting.
Here you can follow the step-by-step process on how to apply conditional formatting, which is an Excel feature for highlighting email messages according to their age.
Consider highlighting emails that are more than 90 days old, for instance.
- Here first shoot Outlook and switch to “View” tab
- Now click Change view then “Manage views”
- Now manage all view dialog box pops up >> Click New button >> this will take you to Create a New View dialog box.
- Now name your new view text box in the Create a New View dialog box, >> Select All Mail and Post folders (IMAP), and hit OK.
- After that the advanced View Settings dialog box appears with that same name, Now press the conditional formatting button to create the conditional format.
- Then a conditional formatting dialog box appears, there are few by default rules available, in the current scenario, Hit Add.
- Here name your Rule – “Mail Smartly”, click the font button, and a font dialog box displayed, you can adjust (fonts, fonts style, size, effects, color, script) according to your choice, your select, after all, adjustments will separate email messages.
- Then the next step is to click the condition, the most important step for auto highlight emails in outlook, clicking on the condition “FILTER” dialog box pops up.
In this case, you can choose from multiple options as seen below:
- First hit Advanced tab then Click Field button now select Frequently-used fields from the drop-down list.
- When under the ‘Frequently used field’, you can find multiple options every option open a gate of strategy, in our case you have to select ‘received’.
- After that the next step is to select the condition, you again have multiple options of time criteria under the condition drop-down list.
All of the choices are much greater than you might expect:
- Anytime
- Yesterday
- Today
- Tomorrow
- In the last 7 days
- In the next 7 days
- Last Week
- This Week
- Next Week
- Last Month
- This Month
- Next Month
- On
- On or before
- Between
- Exists
- On or after
- Does not exist
- Now select ‘between’ and then type manually in the value section “4 months ago and 6 months ago”.
Note: You can create a Custom Filter to select a condition and enter value comment manually according to your search criteria
- After all you are done now, click the ‘Add to List’ button. Your criteria were added to the above list. Click OK.
Now everything is set, follow the step to take a look at your result:
- In order to check click View Tab then change View and you can find another view option which you have created earlier in the article now click to that.
- You can check out how your email messages change colors according to their age. The result is pretty sweet! Now remember that the outcome varies, based on what you have decided in the filter option above. And although emails that enter that threshold are guaranteed to change, it’s not necessarily all or nothing changes – specific messages might just happen to step out of the barrier one time and then step right back in again.
How Conditional Formatting Highlight Emails In Outlook, there are countless conditional formatting rules in outlook. These will help you eliminate the extra work of having to manually go through your inbox.
Hello, My name is Shari & I am a writer for the ‘Outlook AppIns’ blog. I’m a CSIT graduate & I’ve been working in the IT industry for 3 years.