With so many emails arriving in your Outlook inbox every day, it can be easy to miss those messages that are high priority or emails that we want to respond to faster. Microsoft Outlook includes a variety of ways for us to organize and prioritize our messages. One way to highlight important or priority messages is by using conditional formatting.
What if I have messages from Big Boss and would like them to stand out? Now, in a typical inbox, these could easily get mixed up with many other messages that just flow through Outlook. With conditional formatting, you can create a condition to format messages from the Big Boss (or a top customer or other priority contact) to display in a larger font or a different color, or both.
To set up Outlook conditional formatting:
- Go to the View tab. Now, this is where we can customize and change our view of our inbox.
- From here, we will choose See settings. And you may want to explore this so you can customize which columns are displayed, how your information is sorted or filtered, and other settings.
- But our focus right now is Conditional format. Choose this option. This is where you can see, for example, why unread messages will be bolded in blue. So know that you can change that if you want to have a different display or preference.
- To highlight important messages from the Big Boss, first, we’ll choose Add. Next, we will name this rule as The big boss. Use something descriptive so it’s easier for you to come back to it later.
- There are two things you’ll want to do here. The first is to choose how you want the appearance of your message to change. We want the formatting or appearance to be different, perhaps a larger font or a different color of text. Choose from any of the options that are available to you, such as large red text. Once you’ve set that format, select okay.
- It’s not done yet because we also need to set the condition, i.e. what are the circumstances under which this font change will be applied? For this, we choose Condition and then establish those conditions or criteria. In my example, it will be a specific email address for Big Boss, but you could drill down into the filter and it could be something that is perhaps in the subject line or in the body of the message. Once you create the condition, simply okay, okayand see what happens.
So now those key messages are really going to pop up, they’re going to stand out, and if you haven’t been in my inbox all day or just went to a meeting and been away for a couple of hours, you can figure out that these might be your messages. main. priority responses. Conditional formatting applies to both new messages and messages already in your inbox.
If you have a lot of conditions, then the value of conditional formatting will be diluted, but this could be a way to flag those key messages from your main client, a supervisor, or some other email that comes your way that you want to send. make sure you have the highest priority. Where can you use conditional formatting in Microsoft Outlook to highlight those important messages? You’ll find other Outlook tips and techniques here.