Additional information that applies to this Help Topic

To learn more regarding Menu Items and how they are used in Categorize Plus, then please refer to the Menu Items help topic.  For information regarding the criteria field used with Categorize Plus Menu Items, then please refer to the Entering Menu Criteria help topic.  For information on how to create Categorize Plus Menu Items and add them to the Menu Hierarchy, then please refer to the Building Menus help topic.

Behavior of a Standard Menu Hierarchy

A Standard Menu Hierarchy functions differently than a Group Menu Hierarchy.  When a child Menu Item is selected from within a Standard Menu Hierarchy, then both the child Menu Item and the parent Menu Item are simultaneously added as combo boxes to the Categorize Plus Toolbar, or if categorizing items, then both the child and the parent categories are added to the selected Outlook items.  Conversely, when a child Menu Item is selected from within a Group Menu Hierarchy, then the parent group Menu Item is not added to the toolbar and neither is the parent group category included when categorizing items.

How to use a Standard Menu Hierarchy

The purpose of the Standard Menu Hierarchy is to organize information based on combinations of Menu Item criteria.  As a simple example, assume that a company sells a product, and during the process of selling the product, the company manages activities related to design, reliability, packaging and the distribution.  To organize information pertaining to each of these activities, it makes sense to create four categories consisting of Design, Reliability, Packaging and Distribution.

Now assume that the company receives returns and that these returns can be categorized into one of the above four categories.  In other words, the four reasons why products are returned can be described as design flaw, reliability failure, damaged packaging or errors in distribution.  Therefore, to organize information regarding returns, rather than creating four additional categories for each type of return, it is easier to create a single category called Returns and then combine this category with one of the other four previously created categories in order to uniquely classify each type of return.  If this is done, then Categorize Plus can be used to filter or search all Outlook items that pertain to returns for package damage simply by adding both Packaging and Returns as Filter Combo Boxes or Search Combo Boxes to the Categorize Plus Toolbar.

In this scenario, one could construct a menu hierarchy where the Returns Menu Item is a child of each of the four other Menu Items, Design, Reliability, Packaging and Distribution.  Then, to filter for Outlook items that pertain to returns for package damage, one would select the Returns Menu Item under Packaging from the Categorize Plus Filter Menu.  This would then add both a Returns and Packaging Category Filter combo box to the Categorize Plus toolbar.  In this manner, Categorize Plus allows complete flexibility in arranging Menu Items into hierarchies, and these hierarchies can be replicated and arranged in a infinite number of combinations.

Example of Adding Category Filter Combo Boxes using a Standard Menu Hierarchy:

See Also

Categorize Plus Toolbar | Menu Hierarchy | Group Menu Hierarchy | Building Menus | Menu Items | Feature Comparison