If you’ve used a personal finance or checkbook program such as Microsoft Money or Intuit Quicken, you’re probably familiar with categories. In these programs, you can assign a category to each check, deposit, or other transaction and then view all transactions for a specific category, perhaps printing them in a report for tax purposes. For example, you might use categories to keep track of business expenses and separate them by certain criteria, such as reimbursement policy or tax deductions.

Outlook 2007 categories perform essentially the same function: you can assign categories to Outlook 2007 items and manipulate the data based on those categories. For example, you might use categories to assign Outlook 2007 items such as messages and tasks to a specific project. You could then quickly locate all items related to that project. Or you might use categories to differentiate personal contacts from business contacts. Whatever your need for organization, categories offer a handy and efficient way to achieve your goal.

What can you do with categories? First, with the new integration of color with categories, you can tell instantly what category is assigned to a given item. For example, let’s say you create a rule that assigns the Red category to all messages from a particular contact. You can then tell at a glance—without doing anything else—which messages are from that person. Or perhaps you assign the Red category to business messages and Green to personal. Whatever the case, color categories are a great means for visually identifying specific types of messages.

After you assign a category to each relevant Outlook 2007 item, you can sort, search, and organize your data according to the category. Figure 5-1, for example, shows the Advanced Find dialog box after a search for all Outlook 2007 items assigned to the category Toy Show. Figure 5-2 shows the Contacts folder organized by category, displaying all contacts who are involved in the toy show. The ability to search by category makes it easy to find all the items associated with a specific project, contract, issue, or general category.

Figure 5-1. The Advanced Find dialog box displays the results of a search for all Toy Show items.

Figure 5-2. You can group contacts by category to list all contacts involved in a particular event or project.

Categories are useful only if you apply them consistently. After you become disciplined in using categories and begin to assign them out of habit, you’ll wonder how you ever organized your day without them.