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Situation: My work group has a shared conference call dial-in number. To avoid double booking the dial-in number, we have to reserve time in a shared calendar. All users have read/write permissions, and our easiest method of booking a time slot is just click and drag already scheduled meetings from our personal calendar (left side) into the shared calendar (right side), pictured below.

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Question: I'd like to help with visualization and denote each user with a color. How do I share conditional formatting so that each user or 'Organizer' of that meeting is shown as a different color.

I can conditional format each user on my personal session, but I checked with a co-worker and the color formatting did not sync with his session.

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  • You can copy Custom Views, but it is a convoluted process. Its not like sharing rules wizard: outlook-tips.net/how-to/copy-outlook-custom-views -- How many people share the calendar? You could manually update each person's View and update as needed.
    – Sun
    Apr 14, 2016 at 18:38
  • There are 7 users sharing the calendar (as depicted above). I had set each name as a separate rule (and a separate color) dependent on the meeting 'organizer'. I've confirmed that the conditionals work on my computer, but I would rather not set up 6 other people's personal work computers with the same conditionals, I just want to push it to them.
    – dasMetzger
    Apr 14, 2016 at 18:53
  • Conditional formatting is specific to the workstation only. You can try CatMan, a free third-party add-on that will perform the sync for you assuming you have a shared location to reference the details from. codetwo.com/freeware/catman
    – Sun
    Apr 15, 2016 at 14:46

1 Answer 1

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You can right-click on a Calendar item and use Categories instead to apply color to calendar items. The color should apply to anyone else that has access to the Shared calendar. One category will apply the specific color, but two or more categories will not. The Categories behave like tags so if one of your colleagues chooses a different category, the Calendar item will have two Categories.

You should also take note of the default/automatic people use for the Shared calendar. The default may be green, so you may want to exclude that as a color.

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Color coding is based on the what you've tagged the Calendar item with.

For test on the left side, I chose green color, but called it "Purple category".

Since the Shared Calendar's "Purple category" is actually purple, it shows up purple there:

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  • A few things about this answer that dont address my original question: 1) Setting category color in a Personal Calendar dont transfer automatically to a shared calendar 2) Category descriptions are already used from those categories defined in the personal calendar 3) this would be a manual process and not automatically color each meeting based on the user that created it.
    – dasMetzger
    Apr 14, 2016 at 17:18
  • I'm using Outlook 2013. Categories colors transfer okay with me and I confirmed with a colleague that color is showing up correctly. The colors will not transfer correctly if the Category name and color on shared calendar do not match your names. If you keep it generic like Blue category, Green category, it will work. What gets carried over to Shared calendar is the Category name. When the name matches, the color designated on the Shared Calendar will show. Otherwise, it'll be the default color. I hope that explains your concerns. Try it out and let me know.
    – Sun
    Apr 14, 2016 at 18:15
  • I appreciate your input, but I tagged this as Outlook 2010. I cannot accept this answer if it's only good for 2013. I checked with my coworker after changing category colors and they do not sync with the shared calendar on his computer. I really was hoping that the fix would be related to sharing the conditional formatting internal to the shared calendar itself. That prevents the need for users to do anything manual to the individual events, as categories must be individually assigned (not to mention if users already use category colors for other uses, this wont work either).
    – dasMetzger
    Apr 14, 2016 at 18:21
  • The Category name (tag) is what gets transferred with the Calendar item, not color. The color is only applied if there is a tag match on the Shared calendar. Conditional formatting is account specific, so your conditions would only work if everyone else had the exact same condition. If people don't use Categories, you can leverage it. If it is used, then Conditional formatting can only work if everyone else has the same custom view as you.
    – Sun
    Apr 14, 2016 at 18:40

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