Council 1. Colour colouring of the calendar

Despite initial doubts about the usefulness of the colour coding introduced in Outlook 2002, this feature proved to be one of the most convenient. In the Day/Week/Month view, you can assign a specific colour to each family member, colour-coded deadlines, events that need to be prepared in advance, and travel dates. To assign a colour tag to a business meeting, right-click in the view, select Label and the desired colour. The Label drop-down list for the selected meeting is located to the right of the Location field.

To change the text associated with any colour, you need to select Edit, Label, Edit Labels from the main Outlook menu. It is useful to make a list of colour data labels, their values and original text. If you want to use colour-coded labels to filter the calendar view (e.g., to print the dates of all trips), you need to know the original text of the label, as special labels are not displayed in the Filter dialogue box.

Tip 2: Using the Query Builder tool for filtering and searching

With the help of Query Builder, you can extend the filtering and search criteria in Outlook. To add the Query Builder tab to the dialogues, open the registry editor, go to the HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice11.0Outlook section (specify 10.0 for Outlook 2002 and 9.0 for Outlook 2000) and create a new section named QueryBuilder. In Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, the Query Builder tab appears in three different dialogue boxes: Filter (View, Arrange By, Current View, Customize Current View, Filter); Advanced Find (Tools, Find, Advanced Find); and Folder Search Conditions dialog box (see tip 4 in the main article). Like the Filter and Advanced Find dialogues, Query Builder allows you to select the Outlook fields to be searched in. However, it is possible to combine conditions in Query Builder using not only the logical AND operation but also the logical OR operation, which allows you to build more complex queries than in the Filter and Advanced Find.

Tip 3. Applying rules on demand

Sometimes Outlook rules don’t work as expected. Sometimes there are too many requests coming in at the same time or the Outlook 2003 filter Junk E-mail Filter classifies the messages as spam and the rules don’t automatically apply to them. Any rule can be manually applied to all objects in a folder. You should go to the folder whose objects you want to process, select the Rules and Alerts feature from the Tools menu and click on the Run Rules Now button. The sequence of commands in Outlook 2002 is Tools, Rules Wizard, Run Now.

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