{"id":1019,"date":"2008-03-14T19:02:15","date_gmt":"2008-03-14T19:02:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/03\/management-of-categories-in-outlook-2003-and-2007.htm"},"modified":"2008-03-14T19:02:38","modified_gmt":"2008-03-14T19:02:38","slug":"management-of-categories-in-outlook-2003-and-2007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/03\/management-of-categories-in-outlook-2003-and-2007.htm","title":{"rendered":"Category management in Outlook 2003 and 2007"},"content":{"rendered":"

Office 2007 has many improvements over previous versions but most of my colleagues use Office 2003. As I’ve had to install a virtual machine (VM) on my 64-bit desktop in order to run essential 32-bit applications (like our VPN client), I decided to stay as close to the corporate standard as possible and installed Office 2003 in the VM. One unfortunate side effect (apart from the many features that I am missing in Outlook) was the loss of the categories upon which much of my e-mail searching and filtering is based.<\/p>\n

Earlier versions of Outlook featured something called the master category list, which could be transferred between PCs using a registry key export and import. Unfortunately, Outlook 2007 dispenses with this approach and instead stores the categories in the master store (mailbox or personal folder)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It seems that I can still search and filter on the categories that my mail was assigned to<\/a> (they are just not in the master category list) but this also restricted me when adding new mail to categories. <\/p>\n

In the end, I decided that reverting to Outlook 2003 was just too painful and I started using Outlook 2007 again to access my corporate e-mail.<\/p>\n

The following links may be useful to anyone else who is trying to get to grips with categories in Outlook:<\/p>\n