From the course: Outlook 2019 Essential Training

Use conditional formatting to change font and color

From the course: Outlook 2019 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Use conditional formatting to change font and color

“

- [Narrator] We all organize differently. Some of us are visual, some of us are sorters. Putting messages in a folder may work for some people while others need to see everything in the inbox. For those people, we can change the color of emails on a conditional basis, for example, any email from a certain sender or containing a certain subject line. We can do this with categories, which I'll talk about in a later video, but I want to show you how to use conditional formatting. To create a conditional format, select the View ribbon tab, and choose View Settings on the left. From here, click Conditional Formatting. There are some rules that are already in existence, but let's click Add to create a new one. I want to take all of my emails that come in with the words tech fest in the subject or body, and turn them red and bold so I can see them clearly. Because tech fest is a major project that I'm working on, I'd like to know instantly when something's going on about that in my inbox. So I'll start by giving it a name, and I'll call it tech fest. Next, I'll click Font. I need to choose the formatting before I choose the condition. So I'll change the color to a nice bright red, and I'll change the font to boldface. I could also make the size bigger or smaller, or I could change the font face entirely. Click okay, and then click Condition. Now we're going to choose the condition in which those font properties are going to change. I'm going to type the word tech fest, and I'm going to search for that in the subject field and message body. I could further refine the conditions. For example, I could choose to have the text be tech fest and from a certain sender. I can also click More Choices. For example, only items that are read or unread with attachments or no attachments. I can even choose messages that are a particular size. This is great if I want to quickly identify any emails that come in with very large attachments. I'll click okay for now, okay again, and then okay one last time. The changes take effect immediately. And now I can do a quick sweep of my inbox and see several emails that match this criteria. In fact, one of my emails was an unread message. Instead of a blue bar on the left, it now appears as a thick red bar in the view. When I click on it to read it, the bar will go away, but the message will stay bright red, just as we specified. To change the view settings at any time, make sure you're on the View ribbon tab and click View Settings again. I'll select Conditional Formatting one more time. I'll select my rule. If you've made a lot of changes to the formatting or the condition, you don't have to delete the rule by selecting Delete. You can simply un-check it. This will make it not active anymore. However, it will remain here so you can come and re-select it anytime you need the rule active. I'll click okay, okay again, and my view goes back the way it was before I applied the conditional formatting.

Contents