How to automatically categorize calendar appointments in Outlook?

For many Outlook users, they tend to categorize their calendar appointments with different colors. For example, all the appointments with a word “training” in the subject line will be turned “Blue”, and all the appointments with words “Sales meeting” will be turned “Green”, and so on. It is painful to categorize them manually one by one. Fortunately, Outlook provides us with a rule of automatically categorizing calendar appointments. Please look at the following tutorial.

Auto categorize calendar appointments in Outlook

Auto categorize calendar appointments in Outlook

1. Shift to the Calendar view by clicking Calendar option.

2. After entering the Calendar view, please click View > View Settings, in Outlook 2010 and 2013.

In Outlook 2007, please click View > Current View > Customize current view. See screenshot:

Or you can right click on one appointment in your calendar, and then select Automatic Formatting from the right-clicking menu in Outlook 2007.

3. In the Advanced View Settings: Calendar dialog (Customize View: Day/Week/Month dialog in Outlook 2007), click Conditional Formatting button (Automatic Formatting in Outlook 2007).

4. In the following dialog, please click Add button to create a new rule. Type a name for the rule in the Name field. Choose a color for the rule in the Color drop-down list (here I choose the purple color). Then click Condition button. See screenshot:

5. In the Filter dialog, please type the word(s) that you want to search for categorizing in the Search for the word(s) field. Then select subject field only from the In: drop-down list and click OK.

6. Click OK twice to close the dialogs.

And your old appointments which contain the word “training” are categorized with purple at once. See screenshot:

From now on, when you create new appointments that include the word “training” in the subject field, the appointments will be automatically turned purple as well.