Outlook 2010 Conditional Formatting

[BlueHorizon]

Hi everyone,

I know how to set conditional formatting to change the appearance of new emails when a certain word is in the subject. What I want to do is change the appearance if a certain word BEGINS the subject, but not when it is merely contained in the subject.

Example: If the word "Call" begins the subject line, I want it to turn red. If the word "Call" is somewhere else in the subject, I don't want it to turn red.

Any thoughts?

Best,
KV
Blue Horizon

 

[strongm]

Sadly Outlook doesn't support this functionality directly (neither Outlook conditional formatting nor Rules support the necessary pattern matching)

We can achieve the desired affect through some devious tricks ...

Step 1
Create a new colour category. The example uses one called 'MakeRed'

Step 2
Create a custom action that can assign a category to a mail item. Code such as the following should be put in ThisOutlookSession:

[blue]Public Sub ColourCat(Item As Outlook.MailItem)
    With Item
        Select Case .Subject <> ""
            Case InStr(LCase(.Subject), "call") = 1 [green]' matches subject starting with 'call'[/green]
                If .Categories = "" Then
                    .Categories = "MakeRed" [green]' The category we created previously[/green]
                ElseIf InStr(.Categories, "MakeRed") = 0 Then
                    Debug.Print .Categories
                    .Categories = .Categories & ", MakeRed"
                End If
            [green]'Case <a different match if you wanted>[/green]
            Case Else
        End Select
        .Save
    End With
End Sub[/blue]

Step 3
Create an Outlook rule (give it an appropriate name) that applies to all incoming messages, and which runs a script. Select the above script - ColourCat - in the script selection dialog.

Step 4
Create a conditional format that colours items red that are categorized as MakeRed

And you are done.

 

[BlueHorizon]

Thanks, strongm! I'll give this a try !

Best,
Blue Horizon