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Conditional Formatting by Contact Category

Slipstick Systems

› Outlook › Rules, Filters & Views › Conditional Formatting by Contact Category

Last reviewed on May 2, 2016     1 Comment

A very frequent request is the ability to apply rules or automatic formatting to messages and meetings with people in specific categories.

For example, the user wants a rule that moves all mail from people who are assigned the Green color category to the Green folder. Or they want to highlight all mail sent from people assigned to the Green category with the green text.

While this is a great idea and would make color categories more useful, unfortunately, this is not possible in current versions of Outlook.

"I want emails coming in from color categorized contacts to have a different view when coming in. I see where you can change settings for the view and I create a conditional format that says change the font of the email when it comes in if the contact is in this category."

There are two ways to make this work.

If the list of addresses is short, create a Conditional formatting view (Automatic formatting in older versions of Outlook) and list the addresses in the From field on the Messages tab. This From field applies to the email address or apply it to all email from any domain by entering a comma separated list of addresses and/or domains: "microsoft.com, slipstick.com,mary@contrary.com"
Conditional formatting rule to highlight messages from senders

To apply a conditional formatting rule to a long list of addresses or when the list is updated often, a separate Contacts folder for the “category” members usually works better. Enable the contact folder as an address book then create a rule that applies a category to messages from members of this address book.

Once this is done, conditional formatting can be applied to the messages in the category. This isn't my favorite solution because it means multiple contacts folders, but it's an easy way to work with large or dynamic groups.

Conditional Formatting by Contact Category was last modified: May 2nd, 2016 by Diane Poremsky

Related Posts:

  • Apply Conditional Formatting to Internal Email
  • Use Conditional Formatting to Highlight Messages
  • Create a conditional formatting rule
    Where is the Organizer?
  • Creating New Color Categories

About Diane Poremsky

A Microsoft Outlook Most Valuable Professional (MVP) since 1999, Diane is the author of several books, including Outlook 2013 Absolute Beginners Book. She also created video training CDs and online training classes for Microsoft Outlook. You can find her helping people online in Outlook Forums as well as in the Microsoft Answers and TechNet forums.

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Peter Forest (@guest_220313)
May 29, 2023 8:45 pm
#220313

Hi Diane. I like to colour code my contacts.
I use conditional formatting for that (not categories) and colourise the "File As" field in bold/blue font. It works great.
However I'd like to sort my contact list and have these contacts at the top of my list as I use them most.
How do I set up my list view in Outlook contacts to do that please?
Everyone talks about using Categorise but I dont want to do it that way as my important contacts are across many categories.

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