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Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog

The official blog of the Microsoft Outlook product team

Conditional Formatting: Highlight your most important mailsAugust 30

Last month I wrote about how to quickly create rules to help rid your Inbox of so-called graymail. This week I wanted to share another tool for making sure the right email messages stick out when you’re reading down the message list in your Inbox. This advice comes straight out of the Outlook Best Practices – a series of guidelines to help you be as productive as possible with Outlook.

Conditional Formatting allows you to customize how different messages appear in your Inbox message list based on criteria that you set. By default, conditional formatting makes unread messages bold. By adding your own customizations, you can highlight the messages that are most important to you.

For example, when you are at work, emails that are sent directly to you and no one else are probably some of the more important messages for you to review. For that reason you might want to set these messages to appear larger than others in your Inbox.

To set up Conditional Formatting from your Inbox, on the View tab, in the Current View group, click View Settings, and then click Conditional Formatting. Click Add to create a conditional formatting rule.

Let me take you through an example. I first created a formatting rule for mail that is sent only to me, so after clicking Add, I named it “Only You.”

Community Support at answers.microsoft.comAugust 19

Hello Readers,

Many of you have posted comments on our previous posts asking for help with specific features or questions with Outlook 2010. While we enjoy hearing your thoughts about Outlook, we cannot support individual users via blog comments.

That’s why we want to introduce you to answers.microsoft.com, a community forum where you can post questions and receive responses from other users, Microsoft MVPs, and support personnel. Best of all, support from answers.microsoft.com is free!

If you’re an Outlook expert, test your skills by answering other users’ questions on answers.microsoft.com. If you have questions about Outlook or Microsoft Office, check out the answers forum to see if other people have asked your question, or ask your own. You can also find forums for other Microsoft products such as Windows, Security Essentials, or Windows Phone. We hope you find the answers forum a useful reference!

Josh Meisels

Outlook Program Manager

Suggested Contacts: Never lose an email addressAugust 11

Last week I needed to send an email to a contact at Contoso, a company we partner with on marketing materials. Unfortunately, I had not emailed my contact in about a year and I couldn’t remember her name, let alone her email address. Since we had only exchanged a few emails I had neglected to add her to my Outlook contacts. However, with Outlook 2010 I was still able to find her email address quickly using Suggested Contacts.

Suggested Contacts automatically keeps track of everyone you send a message to. Unlike the Auto-Complete List that appears when you begin typing a name or e-mail address in the To, Cc, or Bcc boxes of a message, you can search your suggested contacts, and there is no maximum number of suggested contacts (the Auto-Complete List has a maximum of 1,000 entries).

Here’s how I found my Contoso contact. In the Navigation P

Insert and send a calendar!July 29

During the summer season, I like to travel and visit my family and friends. Before I leave the office for my trips, I share these important dates with my colleagues so they know that I won’t be around the office. Instead of sending an email message to my colleagues with a list of dates, I prefer to include a visual representation of my calendar.

On the Insert tab, in the Include group, click Calendar.

I choose which calendar that I want to include in my message.

Quick Rule Creation in Outlook 2010July 21

If you are a heavy email user like me, chances are good that you subscribe to a lot of mailing lists. Unsolicited spam is one issue we battle in our inboxes, but perhaps more perplexing is the amount of email messages that we call “graymail.”

Graymail consists of all those newsletters, coupons, and notifications that can sometimes be useful, but aren’t the things that you want to appear at the top of your Inbox. For example, some of the graymail I regularly receive includes notifications from Netflix, sale flyers from a local outdoors retailer, and email from a food and wine discussion group.

I like to see what movie Netflix has shipped to me, or what is on sale at my favorite stores, but since these messages aren’t time-sensitive and I don’t need to reply, I don’t want them to appear in my Inbox. I would rather move the messages to a folder where I can browse them later.

Outlook 2010 makes it easy for me to sort emails that need attention from graymail. For example, when I received a shipping notification from Netflix, on the ribbon I went to the Home tab and then clicked Rules. Then I clicked Always Move Messages from: Netflix. The sender was suggested based on the message sender and recipients (if it was sent to people other than you).