Microsoft Outlook Categories
Microsoft Outlook's "Categories" Feature
Use Microsoft 365 Categories to organize and manage your Outlook calendar, contacts, emails, and tasks.
Tagging content with categories that distinguish projects, priorities or other classifications with colour-coded tags helps you to distinguish between content and. Using categories, you can search across Outlook for emails, tasks, events that are tagged with the same category.
Click on the headers below to find out how to create and customize categories. Click or tap on images to expand images to full size.
What are categories for?
Categories help you organize and manage contacts, email, calendar items, and tasks. For instance, instead of moving or copying emails to folders, you could keep emails in your Inbox and tag emails with categories. This way, you can filter your Inbox on demand to show one or more categories. In situations where an email could be saved in two folders, it is more efficient to keep the email in your Inbox and assign two categories to that email. Using tags you can:
- create category names and colours
- tag and group related emails
- organize your calendar events by type, such as meetings, personal appointments, or deadlines
- group your contacts as family, friends, colleagues, or clients
- organize your tasks by project, priority, or status
Categories are usually used at an individual level. However A shared email account would rely on categories established for that account. Uniform categories can be established at an organizational level. This requires adminstrator-level knowledge.
How to create and manage tags
An easy to create your tags is to:
- create a new email in Outlook
- click open the <Categories> dropdown list.
A few categories are already listed in the pull down menu by default. These are intended as a starting point. In the illustration below notice that there are user-defined categories instead of the defaults. Towards the bottom of the list you will see that you can create, edit, and show categories. Click on <New category> to create a new category.
Notice how you can show all categories and search for categories. Once you create a category, it is available for use in Email, Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks. Once categories are created, you can use this dropdown menu to assign one or more categories to an email, event, contact, or task – the categories will be available for all Outlook functions.
Editing and managing categories
You can edit existing tags to change names and colours. In any email composition and calendar event windows, pull down the <categories> dropdown menu and click open <Manage categories>. Her you can “fave” categories, and you can click on the pencil icon to edit category properties. In the image below, clicking on the pencil in the DNS/web row would open the properties for that category.
Planning Categories
It is important to plan a rationale for categories. Sometimes, categories can become so large that users forget what categories they already have. For instance, if you are tagging customers, it might makes sense to have a category for “customer”, but also a category for customer-customer surname. This way “customer” is a category header, and “customer-surname” is a sub heading. Organising a strategy for categories helps you manage your list as it grows.
Summary
Outlook Categories add a flexible and visual way to keep your Outlook items organized, making it easier to manage your communications and schedules.
Categories are intended for individual use, but organizations might opt to have individual users follow a common colour-coding theme and defined list for individuals to build in their own instance of Outlook. Categories can be established at organizational level, but this requires administrator level implementation.
