Categories are labels you can apply to just about any Entourage item. They’re designed to let you apply an organizational scheme to a group of items that don’t otherwise have much in common. For example, you can define a category related to a trip that you’re taking, or to a certain work project, and apply that category to dissimilar Entourage information bits (calendar, email, and to-do items, for example). Each category can have its own color, making it easy to identify those items at a glance. Categories, in other words, are a yet another convenient, easy-to-use means of helping you organize and keep track of your Entourage information.
Entourage comes with an assortment of prefab categories—Family, Friends, Holiday, Junk, Personal, Recreation, Travel, and Work. If you import holidays into Entourage—see the box on Saving Calendars as Web Pages—they show up in a category of their own.
Don’t confuse Categories with Entourage’s Project Center feature. Although both are methods for organizing disparate bits of information, the Project Center does much more than merely assign an organizational label to an item. For a full discussion of the Project Center, flip to Project Center.
You can also create new categories, of course. For example, every organized activist needs categories like Environment, Salmon, Blogging, and Fundraising. To do so, choose Edit Categories from the Categories pop-up button on the toolbar, or choose Edit → Categories → Edit Categories. Either way, you now face the Categories window (Figure 11-22). To create a new category, click New and type the name you want for your new pigeonhole. Entourage assigns a color to your new category, but you can choose any of the 13 colors listed on the pop-up menu, or choose Other to mix your own color.
Anything you can create, you can delete. Expunge a category by clicking its name and then clicking Delete.
Figure 11-22. Top: Entourage lets you create any number of your own categories, which you can then apply to Entourage items of any kind—including folders in your email box. Bottom: To assign multiple categories to an item, open the Assign Categories window and then turn on the checkboxes next to the categories you want to assign. Whichever category was assigned to that item first is its Primary category, the color it displays in a list. Choose a category and click Set Primary to change this behavior. Once you’ve done so, click OK; Entourage assigns all checked categories to the selected items.
The Categories window has one other nifty feature: the Related button. Select a category for which you’d like to search for items, and then click this button. Entourage shows you a tidy listing of all the items in your Entourage world—messages, tasks, and so on—to which you’ve assigned that category.
To assign a category to an Entourage item—an email message, calendar event, task, note, news message, contact, or even an item in the email Folder list—simply highlight it. (You can also highlight several at once, if you want to categorize them all the same.) Use the Categories pop-up button in the toolbar or the Edit → Categories submenu to choose a category. Entourage assigns the category to the selected item for you and changes its color accordingly.
The main window for certain kinds of Entourage information, including email messages, tasks, notes, and the Address Book, includes a column called Categories. One of the easiest ways to apply a category to an item is to click in this column; a pop-up menu of your categories appears.
You may sometimes need to place an individual Entourage item into more than one category. For instance, a note with flight information might pertain to both the Travel and Work categories. To do so, click the Categories button (or choose Edit → Categories → Assign Categories) to bring up the Assign Categories window (Figure 11-22), where you can assign as many categories as you want by turning on the appropriate checkboxes.
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