Sensible names for Quick Flags in Outlook

Eileen recently blogged about an excellent resource for Outlook Users at www.outlooktips.net. Sign up for email updates or add their RSS feed to your aggregator and they'll send you regular Outlook tips. I had a weird attack of déjà vu though when reading their May 9th tip. They explained some simple steps you can take to give a more sensible name to the quick flags (red flag, blue flag and so on) in Outlook by creating a custom toolbar. Then I remembered: I demo'd that a few weeks back in one of my blogcasts. It's not a new tip by any stretch of the imagination but it's certainly a popular one judging by the amount of coverage it gets. But most importantly it's a really useful tip, so give it a try and let me know what you think.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 10, 2005
  AF,
  I've started using custom names for flags based on your blogcast. But I have a question: Outlook seems to sort the flags in a certain order (red, blue, green, orange, etc.)
  
  Is there a way to change this sort order? So when you sort your flagged emails in a folder, can you customize this sort order (e.g., purple, blue, green, orange, red.)?
  
  Anyway, your blogcasts have been helpful, thanks...
• Anonymous
  May 11, 2005
  I started doing this some months ago following a tip from someone, making it so much easier to deal with my mail - I always used to forget what each flag was meant to represent.
• Anonymous
  May 18, 2005
  To RDM: I'm not aware of a way to change the sort order of Outlook 2003's Quick Flags. This would be a nice enhancement to the product. The order they're in (Red, Blue, Yellow, Green, Orange, Purple) also seems fairly arbitrary to me so I'd love to have the ability to sort these more logically to accommodate the strange way my brain works. I'll ask the dev team to see if this enhancement can be considered for a future version.