Modifying Categories and Category Assignments

At some point, you’ll want to recategorize Outlook 2007 items—that is, you’ll want to add, remove, or modify their category assignments. For example, when one project ends and another begins, some of your contacts will move to a different project, and you’ll want to change the categories assigned to the contact items. Perhaps you’ve added some new categories to further organize your data and want to assign those categories to existing items. Or perhaps you made a mistake when you created an item or assigned categories to it, and now you need to make changes. Whatever the case, changing categories and category assignments is easy.

Changing Existing Categories

For one reason or another, you might need to change a category. You might have misspelled the category when you created it, or you might want to change the wording a little. For example, you might delete the category Foes and create a new one named Friends to replace it (assuming that your friends are not really foes). Unlike in earlier versions of Microsoft Outlook, you can change existing categories in Outlook 2007. When you change a category, all items assigned to that category are updated.

For example, assume that you have created a category named Dallas Toy Show and made the category red. You open the Inbox and assign the category to several messages. Then you open the calendar and assign the category to a few meetings. A week later, you discover that the toy show is moving to Seattle. So you open the Color Categories dialog box and rename the category Seattle Toy Show and change the color to blue. When you look in the Inbox, all of the messages with that assigned category now show the new name and color. Likewise, the appointments in the calendar also show the new name and color.

Inside Out: View by category to change categories

You’ll find that one method works well when you want to make the same change to multiple items, such as changing the categories assigned to contacts. That method is to view the items organized by category. For example, assume that you want to view all of the contacts that have the Foes category and then add the Friends category. Choose View, Arrange By, Categories (for some views, you can choose View, Current View, By Category). Find the Foes category, open one contact in the group, and add the Friends category (simply change Foes to Friends). The item now appears under the Friends category group. Click on the category heading for Foes and drag it to the category heading for Friends. Outlook 2007 adds the Friends category to these contacts.

Note

If you need to change a category globally rather than add one, see "Changing Category Assignments of Multiple Items at One Time" later in this chapter.

Earlier in this chapter, you learned how to create new categories. Changing a category is much like adding a new one.

Follow these steps to modify a category:

  1. In Outlook 2007, select any item, and then choose Edit, Categorize, All Categories.

  2. In the Color Categories dialog box, click a category to select it.

  3. Click Rename, and then type a new name for the category.

  4. Select a new color in the Color drop-down list.

  5. Click OK to close the Color Categories dialog box.

Changing Category Assignments

You can assign categories to an item at any time, adding and removing the categories you want. To change the categories assigned to a specific item, follow these steps:

  1. In Outlook 2007, locate the item for which you want to change the category assignment.

  2. Select the item and choose Edit, Categorize, or right-click the item and choose Categorize on the shortcut menu.

  3. Select a new category in the drop-down list, or choose All Categories to open the Color Categories dialog box, and then assign or remove multiple categories.

Changing Category Assignments of Multiple Items at One Time

In some cases, you’ll want to change the category assignments of several items at one time. For example, assume that you’ve assigned the category Seattle Toy Show to 50 messages in your Inbox. (You really should do a better job of cleaning out your Inbox!) Now you want to clear the categories on all of those messages. You could change the messages one at a time, or you could hold down Ctrl, select each message, and then change the category. But for a larger number of items, there is an easier way—the trick is to use a view organized by category:

  1. Open the folder containing the items whose categories you want to change.

  2. Choose View, Arrange By, Categories.

  3. Locate the items under the category you want to change.

  4. If the category you want to assign to the items has not been assigned yet to any items, assign the category to one item. That item should now show up in the view under its category.

  5. Click on the category you are changing, and drag it to the target category.

An important point to understand when using this method to change categories is that Outlook 2007 assigns the target category (the one on which you drop the items) exclusively to the items. For example, assume that you have several items with Red, Blue, and Green category assignments. You drag those items to the Yellow category. All of the items now have only the Yellow category. The other categories are removed.

If you want to assign categories to a group of items, you have a couple of different methods from which to choose. If the number of items is relatively small, hold down the Ctrl key, select each item, and then right-click an item and choose Categorize, followed by a category selection. Or choose All Categories to assign multiple new categories.

Note

A list view usually works best when you need to select multiple items.

If you need to change a lot of items, first organize the view by category (choose View, Arrange By, Categories). Then right-click the category whose items you want to change, choose Categorize, and then choose a new category (or choose All Categories to modify multiple categories). Outlook 2007 displays a warning message informing you that the action will be applied to all items in the selected category. Click OK to continue with the change.

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