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How to add more color categories in Outlook?

Author: Kelly Last Modified: 2020-05-28

Normally you may label messages, tasks, or others with color categories in Outlook, which help you identify them from a mass of items at a glance, and group/filter them together with same color categories quickly. In addition to one color categories, you can add as many color categories as you need to one item. Here is an easy tutorial to add many color categories for one message, one task, one appointment, and one note, as well as create new color categories in Outlook.

Add more color categories for a message, task, appointment, contact, or note

Add and create more new color categories in Outlook


arrow blue right bubble Add more color categories for a message, task, appointment, contact, or note

The first section will show you how to add many color categories for a message, a task, an appointment, a contact, or a note rapidly in Outlook. Here we will take one message for example.

Step 1: Select the message that you will add many color categories for.

Step 2: Click the Home > Categorize > All Categories in the Tags group.

doc add category color 1

In addition to Categorize button in Home Ribbon, right clicking selected message > Categorize > All Categories is also available.
By the way, there is no Ribbon in Outlook 2007’s main interface. However, you can find out the Categorize button in the toolbar.

Step 3: Check the color categories that you will add to the selected message together.

Step 4: Click OK.

Step 5 (Optional): If you use the Category feature for the first time, it will ask you for renaming categories. You can rename categories according to your needs.

Then all of checked color categories are added to the selected message together, and show in the color lump, reading pane of related message, and related message window as well.

doc add category color 2


arrow blue right bubble Add and create more new color categories in Outlook

Current existing color categories may not enough for your categorizing. Right, this section is about how to create more new color categories in Outlook.

Step 1: Click the Categorize > All Categories in the Tags group under Home tab in Outlook 2010 / 2013; or click the Categorize button in the toolbar in Outlook 2007.

Note: The Categorize button is invalid until you select one message, one task, one appointment, one contact, or one note in Outlook.

Step 2: Click the New button in the Color Categories dialog box.

Step 3: In the Add New Category dialog box, enter a name in the Name: box, and pick out a color from the Color: box.

Step 4: Click OK button.

The new created color will list in Color Categories dialog box at once.

Note: If your Email account type is SMTP, for example the Gmail, you are not able to neither add color category for a message, nor create new color category. But it does not affect adding many color categories for tasks, appointments, contacts, and notes.


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Comments (35)
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This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site
Someone asked this in another forum. This was the response they received. Basically NO we can't.



Good day! Thank you for posting to Microsoft Community. We are happy to help you.

Based on your description, I understand that you have a query "More color options for categories."

After thorough research and consulting, it has been determined that there is currently no function in Outlook to allow more colors options for categories. At this time, Outlook for desktop offers a limited number of color options for categorizing items, Outlook provided a set of predefined colors, typically represented by different categories, such as "Red," "Blue," "Green," etc. Unfortunately, there seems to be no built-in option to add custom colors or expand the available color palette.

We apologize if we are not able to meet your requirements; however, thank you for bringing this to our attention, since this is really a very constructive idea, we will surely raise your concerns to our Product Team and hopefully this can be considered in the future updates.

Moreover, I would like to invite community members and MVPs in the forum to share their knowledge or if there may be third-party add-ins or plugins available from other developers that can extend the functionality of Outlook to provide additional color options.

In the meantime, you may create an entry as a feature suggestion in the Feedback Portal at Outlook · Community (microsoft.com), Other users may vote it and make it more visible to the service team so that it may be considered for future upgrades.

For other concerns, please do not hesitate to add you post in the Microsoft Community Team.

Thank you for your cooperation and understanding.
This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site
Es werden mehr als die vorgegebenen Farben gebraucht. Schaltet doch die Farbpalette endlich mal frei!
This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site
I hear your pain. But FUNDAMENTALLY, Microsoft do not give a flying f*** what users want. Never have; never will.

As was succinctly put, above: resistance is futile.
This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site
My apologies for writing in Dutch

I totally agree with the request to have more colors to choose from. Now using Office 201 but should have stayed with 2019. There was more color choice possible. I would also like to be able to determine myself what the background color is, but also what color the text is. Sometimes the black letters are very difficult to read and then white letters would be a better option. Making letters thick would also be a welcome option.
This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site
we are microsoft -- resistance is futile
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