Conditional Formatting: Highlight your most important mails

Nice Post! I have several subfolders under my inbox. I have rules setup to move mail to specific folders. Is there a way to do a global conditinal formating so I don't have to set this up on every folder under my inbox?

I know this is off-topic but I can't find anywhere to post my bug and suggestion, Microsoft Connect doesn't have any open submissions for Outlook. I would like an update for Outlook to support proper CSS such as float and position etc. Can't you easily do something similar to how IE8 handles the standards compliancy? If a full DOCTYPE is included in the HTML email then IE rendering is used in standards mode, else it reverts to the Word rendering and keeps all those Office people happy. Seems like an easy fix to me for Microsoft to have a standards complaint option and also backwards compatibility. I hope someone reads this in the Outlook team and thinks it is also a good idea.

^ Luke - Check out the blog post directly under this one... Or just go to answers.microsoft.com...

Chad, You can apply your conditional formatting and all of your other view settings to a number of folders at once. Once you have set up a folder the way you like, just to to the "View" tab on the ribbon, click "Change View," and then "Apple Current View to Other Mail Folders." From here you can select which folders to apply the customized view to. Hope that helps,

Josh Meisels, Outlook Program Manager

@BraveStarr: Thank you. I have started a topic over there. I don't understand why there is no official bug reporting channel for Office where this should be added. I guess I will have to accept the forum as a place to suggest this.

Thanks for the great article. But what about normal formatting i.e. while browsing through mails, I would like to change formatting for a particular mail. Currently I can categorize it with COLORS, but that does not serve the purpose always. I wish there were buttons(Font type, color, size0 in the context menu to change the formatting.

I have used conditional formatting since it first appeared and love it. However there is a problem.. its not integrated with Exchange. If you open outlook on, say, your laptop and sync your email you have no formatting. If you delete your OST (something I found myself doing regularly with the 2010 Beta otherwise outlook just wouldn't open) you lose all your settings. Please, give us some means of backing up and restoring these settings Ian

Nice post. I have been using it from last 2-3 years :)

Although a nice feature I've been using for quite a while, the colors available reminds me of my Windows 3.1 days. In the next Outlook release, please allow the full color range for this feature. Thanks!

Great feature which I use a lot. However, one area where this doesn't work is the new tabbed view in Business Contact Manager. On the View ribbon there is a View Settings button which allows you to change the conditional formatting for the current view, but it is not saved when you move away from the tab. In all other areas of Outlook the Manage Views screen can be used to save these settings, but this is not available for the tabbed view in BCM. Please can you add this functionality to the BCM as well.

thank you so much , really this post will help me

My unread messages are in Bold Blue, when they are read, they turn to Bold Black. I want to set up a color for a particular sender, when I get e-mails from John Doe, show them in green. Problem is, the blue appears to trump the green. That is, Unread messages from John Doe still show up in blue, once I read them, they turn to green. How do I make the unread e-mails from John Doe show up in green, without turning off the blue for all my other unread e-mails? I've played around with the Conditions, etc. but I cannot move the John Doe formatting above the general unread messages to give it priority. Any help appreciated.

I currently have my unread e-mail in bold Blue, and once I read the message, it turns to bold Black. I’d like e-mail sent to me from John Doe to be bold Green, and once read, then just Green. When I try to set this up using the conditions, unread bold Blue trumps Green. That is, unread messages from John Doe are still Blue, and only turn Green after I have read them (thus, defeating the purpose). In the automatic formatting screen in the Organize/colors, you cannot move the “John Doe” rule above the “unread messages” rule (I assume these would work in a priority). Are there any work arounds so that my unread messages from John Doe are bold Green, and my unread messages from everyone else remains bold Blue?

Hi, just starting out with Outlook 2010 and conditional formatting. I added a conditional format to mark unread messages in red font. However, if I use the 'Mark as Unread' option on a message that I've already read, it ignores my conditional format and puts the message in bold black text (I think the original default format for unread). This seems like a bug? Is there a way to get the 'Mark as Unread' function to use my conditional format instead of the default?

Thanks,

Mike

@Mike - Can you try adding a new conditional format to the bottom of your list? Call it whatever you want, then under 'Condition' | 'More choices' set "Only items that are: unread". Make sure it's the last rule and it should work for you. Jed Brown, Outlook Program Manager