Outlook Email Conditional Formatting

Are you lost in a sea of emails? It might be useful to make certain emails stand out with a special color or formatting. Perhaps a fillable form that comes to your inbox with a specific subject could be green, or all emails from your boss could show up as red. Customizing your inbox with conditional formatting can be a huge time saving tool to help draw attention to certain emails in your inbox at glance.

About Conditional Formatting

Conditional formatting in Outlook will look for certain conditions and apply a specific appearance to them. Here are a few caveats before we jump in:

This feature is currently only available for the PC desktop application of Outlook (apologies to Mac users).
Conditional Formatting applies to one folder at a time. This means that you can create separate rules for each folder. It also means that you should be cautious of which folder is selected before jumping into the view setting.
Changes you make with this setting are at your computer application level only: it is a view setting within the Outlook desktop application. This means that other instances of Outlook (e.g. the online application, or the desktop application running on an additional computer) on will not adopt these view settings.

Create a Conditional Formatting Rule

Start by selecting the folder where you would like to apply the rule. This may just be your Inbox if you are not a big fan of folders.

Go to the View tab, Current View group, and select View Settings.

Select Conditional Formatting.

Here are all your current Conditional Formatting rules. That’s right, you already have some rules… like the way an unread message uses blue font, for instance… I would not recommend changing existing default rules.

On the right select Add.

At the bottom of the popup, you will be prompted to name your rule. Use a name that is relevant to you.

From here, there are two settings we have to create: Font and Condition. Just like with Excel, it is easy to get carried away with creating one setting and forget to do the other…

Font Settings

Let’s set the appearance first.

To the left of your title, select Font.

A popup screen appears with various font options along the top: font type, style and size…

… and of course the funnest part, in the lower left, Color!

Make your font and color selections, then press OK once.

Condition Settings

This second part is easy to forget. Sometimes we spend a lot of time crafting the perfect appearance, and then forget to tell Outlook what the Condition is where the appearance should be applied.

Below where you selected Font, select Condition.

Take a look at your options… you have the ability to format based on:

Specific words in a subject field
Emails from or to specific people
Situations where you are the only person in the To: line
… and we will see some more examples shortly.

For this scenario, I am going to set a condition based on emails From a specific person. Click on the From button to browse the directory. Double click on the person’s name, then press OK.

This option works best if you browse for a name, rather than typing in the full email.

Let’s take a look at the More Choices tab, because things get even more interesting here. Not only are more options present here, but we could layer these on top of the previous selection… here are conditions based on:

Category
Only unread or read items
Items with attachments
Importance level
Items that are flagged

So think about this, you could set your formatting to color code emails from a specific person that are unread; or emails that have specific words in the title that also have attachments. So many possibilities!

Once you have this set how you would like, press OK. Then OK again to get back to your Outlook folder.

If all went well, you should be able to see the effects of your lovely new rule. I picked purple for mine…