Outlook 2007: Upgrade to Color Categories
Contributed by Rob Rogers 
Tagged: Microsoft Outlook If you have upgraded your Outlook to the 2007 version, you will need to perform an upgrade to Color Categories to maintain a consistent look for marking and categorizing your emails. If you don’t, you will have a mixture of bars and squares that make for a confusing Inbox.
1. Right-click the main folder that contains your Inbox, Deleted Items, Sent Items, etc. Select Properties.
2. At the bottom of the Properties window, click the Upgrade to Color Categories button.
3. When asked to confirm the upgrade, click the Yes button. The upgrade may take a little while to complete, but you can continue to use Outlook while it does this.
This will also need to be performed on all Outlook Data Files.
So you have gone from this unattractive combination:
to this:
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color_chart said on November 28, 2008
Thanks… You learn something new every day.. It never really bothered me because i dont use outlook that much but its good to know how to fix it :)
ankur said on December 24, 2010
how can I turn it off… I dont want outlook to do that.. it is slowing my outlook and crashing it
Mad9maxx said on February 5, 2011
Recreate a new Outlook profile. Don’t delete the old profile until you verify the new one works as you want, and after you have migrated your data and settings.