Taking control with categories
28 SEPTEMBER 11
Categories are tags, or keywords that you can assign to any item in Outlook. They can be used to help you find, sort, filter and classify all of the data that your Outlook profile contains. Used in conjunction with Rules and Folders, they can be a very powerful tool for organising all of the information that comes across your desk each day.
You may already be familiar with Outlooks Rules and Folders, and the benefits that these can bring to the management of your inbox. Combining these with categories can help you coordinate your inbox with all of the other parts of Outlook, from your contacts to your scheduled events.
WHAT MAKES CATEGORIES DIFFERENT?
Label maker
Categories allow you to quickly tag all of your mail, contacts, appointments, tasks and meetings that pertain to a specific project, company or subject.
You can then view your items by their respective category (right click in the “Arrange By:” field and choose “Categories”).
Let your data wear many hats
Your information may need to be classified by many different tags to make it useful and easily accessible to you. Folders let you place an email into them, but the information that email contains may be useful in more than just that one place. However, categories let you add as many tags to your data as you like.
Why stop at just one?
Folders will only allow you to place one type of data in them. For example, a folder labelled “Project X” will only let you place one data type into it (emails for instance), but you can use Categories to label emails, calendar events, tasks and notes as “Project X”.
STEPS TO CREATING AND USING A CATEGORY
In Outlook 2007 and 2010, the Categorise icon can be found in the Ribbon at the top of the screen.
Selecting the icon brings up a drop down menu. The “All Categories” option brings up a window that allows you to make new categories, rename the existing ones, or assign multiple categories to the item that you currently have selected in the main view.
You may already be familiar with Outlooks Rules and Folders, and the benefits that these can bring to the management of your inbox. Combining these with categories can help you coordinate your inbox with all of the other parts of Outlook, from your contacts to your scheduled events.
WHAT MAKES CATEGORIES DIFFERENT?
Label maker
Categories allow you to quickly tag all of your mail, contacts, appointments, tasks and meetings that pertain to a specific project, company or subject.
You can then view your items by their respective category (right click in the “Arrange By:” field and choose “Categories”).
Let your data wear many hats
Your information may need to be classified by many different tags to make it useful and easily accessible to you. Folders let you place an email into them, but the information that email contains may be useful in more than just that one place. However, categories let you add as many tags to your data as you like.
Why stop at just one?
Folders will only allow you to place one type of data in them. For example, a folder labelled “Project X” will only let you place one data type into it (emails for instance), but you can use Categories to label emails, calendar events, tasks and notes as “Project X”.
STEPS TO CREATING AND USING A CATEGORY
In Outlook 2007 and 2010, the Categorise icon can be found in the Ribbon at the top of the screen.
Selecting the icon brings up a drop down menu. The “All Categories” option brings up a window that allows you to make new categories, rename the existing ones, or assign multiple categories to the item that you currently have selected in the main view.
Once you have your desired categories, you can add them to Outlook Rules you may already have, create new Rules to add them to your data. You can also manually click the “Categorise” icon when you have the desired item selected, or right click the item and select the categories you want to tag it with.
DISPLAYING YOUR CATEGORIES
DISPLAYING YOUR CATEGORIES
Once you have your desired categories, you can add them to Outlook Rules you may already have, and create new Rules to add them to your data. You can also manually click the “Categorise” icon when you have the desired item selected, or right click the item and select the categories you want to tag it with.
OVERVIEW OF THE ADVANTAGES TO CATEGORIES- You can tag an item with as many categories as you want to, to make sorting and finding related items easy.
- Quick and easy to add, delete or change any category on your Outlook items.
- Use the “Arrange By: Categories” option to view all of your items by their category.
- No duplicated data through needing to make copies of emails for different folders.
- You can use categories to group different data types, allowing you to tag emails, tasks, calendar events etc. with the same category.
- Categories allow for a flatter folder structure. For example, one folder for a subject, with many different categories to organise that folder. This means less searching through folder after folder for your emails.
