Highlight current day or gray-out past days in Microsoft Outlook

Microsoft Outlook in each and every version is missing some obvious, yet very important functionalities and Microsoft’s dumb-asses are reluctant into hearing users voice and adding them. One of such very-missed features is greying-out passed days or highlighting current day.

Without them each and every day in Outlook Calendar looks just the same and ultra-fast distinction between today’s events and passed events is simply impossible.

Fortunately, some workarounds do exists. They may not be enough for all of us, but at least they allow you to learn a little bit about conditional formatting that you can use in Outlook Calendar or Outlook itself (for i.e. colouring events and e-mails etc.).

There is a fairly easy workaround to:

But, there are two obstacles to be taken into consideration:

  • this grays out only passed days’ events not passed events (i.e. today, before),
  • this fails completely on recurring events.

The latter one is because Outlook is to stupid (or actually its designers are that far dumb) to match all conditions in the same time. I.e. its OR not AND there. If you put three rules like that:

  • starts=today,
  • ends=today,
  • recurring=no,

into single condition then nearly everyone would clearly assume that condition will be executed if and only if all three rules are met, right?

Well… no. Not in Microsoft folks’ dumb heads. Here each and every rule of the same condition are matched separately and you’re “catching” all today’s events (or all past events) along with all recurring events: in the past, today and in the future.

The above causes this solution to be completely useless for me. But, hey!, at least I learnt that I can use conditional formatting and how to actually use it in Outlook! So, this day isn’t that wasted at all… :>

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