Now that you’ve created a category, what can you do with it? The answer is: lots of things!

 

The easiest way is to change your view to sort by categories. In the mail folder, just right-click on the Arranged By column heading and click Categories, or click View, choose Arrange By, and click Categories. In the sample below, that option is highlighted in blue. You can see how arranging by categories changes our view:

 

 

In the figure above, you can see the categories circled in red. One has a minus sign beside it, meaning that the items are shown. The other has a plus sign beside it, meaning that its items are hidden. Just click the plus sign to show the items, or click the minus sign to hide them!

 

In the calendar folder, we can sort items by categories the same way. Open your calendar folder, click Arrange by, choose Current View, and click Category. Your view will change to look like this:

 

 

The same idea applies here: you can click a category’s plus sign to show its items, or click the minus side to hide the items.

 

With the other folder types (such as contacts, tasks, notes, and journal), you can sort by category just by clicking the radio button in the Navigation Pane. (You can also click the View menu, click Arrange By, and click Category.) Here’s an example of sorting by category in the Notes folder:

 

 

To the left (in the red circle), you can see the view is selected as category. You can also see in the main window that we have categories sorted with plus and minus sign; a sample one is circled in blue.

 

Here are a few things to remember about these views. First, if an item is in multiple categories, it will show up in all categories when you choose that view. So, it may appear that you have multiple copies of an item when that’s really not the case. As well, you can use the items that appear in category view like normal items: you can modify, delete, and move them. That means deleting an item won’t remove it from its category - it will just move it to the deleted items folder.

 

That’s all there is to using categories!