COLORING THE CALENDAR
by Judy Gleeson, Outlook MVP

The Outlook calendar can be colour coded and printed in colour in Outlook 2002 and 2003. This function is called Labels. You can change the Labels associated with each colour by right clicking on an appointment, selecting Label and Edit Labels... You may for example, wish to colour by project name or type of work. This is useful when viewing your weekly or monthly calendar and the labels are per folder, so each calendar folder can have a different set of labels.

However, if you use the Edit Labels feature to change the text for a Label, be sure to keep a list of the original Label text and the new text. You'll need the original text if you want to filter or group by the Label field or if you want to make a new view of the Calendar that filters by Label. It's a bit daft, but if you try to group by the Label property, Outlook displays the original Label names, not your customized names.

Outlook 2003 extends the automatic formatting feature to the Day/Week/Month view using the colour Labels. Right-click anywhere in a day/week/month view calendar, and choose Automatic Formatting. For example, you can use automatic formatting to create a rule that looks for every appointment where the subject contains "birthday" and set those appointments to use the purple Birthday colour. This would also work for a key project name or a client's name.

ADVANCED LABEL FUNCTIONS

To apply labels in bulk to existing appointment items without using automatic formatting, create a new table view and set it to group by the Label property. You can then drag items from the Label:None group to the group whose label you want to apply to those items. Remember that table views use the built-in label names and ignore the names you may have customised, so keep that list of your customisation handy.

If you have Exchange and use Public Folders, you may want to set up a Calendar that is the equivalent of a wall planner but is accessible to selected people. For example, the Calendar could show the planned marketing events in various colours depending on the type of event. Or you could make a Staff Leave calendar and use different colours for the type of leave, eg maternity leave, rostered day off, sick day, annual leave etc.

Even if you don't have Exchange, making a separate calendar where you apply coloured labels is a practical way to store data about your plans. With a colour printer, you have a nice way of seeing your plans and showing them to others. You can make a Calendar by right clicking in your folder list | New then type the name of the Calendar and make sure to change the format of the folder to Folder contains Calendar items.