Outlook Tip: Quickly Add Items to Categories

When I teach an Outlook class, students are always thrilled to learn about Outlook's Categories feature. Outlook allows you to assign items (ex., contacts) to a specific category (ex., Prospects). You can then perform activities such as send emails to everyone in your Clients category, generate mailing labels for everyone in your Prospects category and more.

Students usually cannot wait to get back to their offices and start assigning their Outlook items to categories.

Assigning Categories can be time-consuming, however. Imagine you have 1,000 contacts you'd like to add to your Prospects category. Assigning Categories the long way could take hours. You'd have to open each Contact, click the Categories button, check off the Prospects Category, close the Category box, Save and Close the Contact.

Fortunately, there's a much quicker and easier way.

• Select the contacts you want to add to a category.
• Right click.
• Select Categories.
• Click the check box next to the category (ex., "Clients").

In one step, all of the contacts you've selected are added to that category.