How to Make Important Emails in MS Outlook Stand Out

Here I will be showing you quickly how to add color to your email entries in Outlook and make them stand out for easier visibility.

Here’s the problem: You get tons of emails in Microsoft Outlook 2016 a day. Out of the blues, you remember there was something you needed to work on sent by a colleague, but by this time, you can’t remember when it was sent, by whom, and even with some keyword searches you still can’t find it.

Well, you can assign a category, but it is still not very visible as it only adds a tiny, tiny square with color.

The solution: Just add that sucker some Conditional Formatting and make it stand out.

This is how you can do it. Just select the email you want to stand out, go to View, then View Settings (it’s an icon with the Big and small cog on top)

This will pop up a window where you can select various buttons, so just go to Conditional Formatting. Once you open that, click Add to create a new “condition” and title it whatever. I titled mine: Work to do.

Now add a Condition, which is another button there that says “Condition…”

In here you go to the “More Choices” tab.

Click “Categories…” This brings up all the existing categories. I created one and called it Work Assigned.

Now click, ok. Going back to the Conditional Formatting window, select “Font…”

Now you can change the color, chose a font and size.

I chose Segoe UI font, regular and Size: Big.

Now, this makes this email stand out among the sea of emails. I don’t want to miss these because it’s work that needs to be done even if not urgent at the moment.

But now that you get the idea go ahead and create different formatting for emails that you want to stand out.