Highlight Today in Calendar

When I use the monthly calendar view in Outlook, I have trouble determining which day is today.
How can I make it strike more?

While Outlook already highlights Today in the Monthly Calendar, I have to admit; I have trouble seeing it as well. This is probably due to the fact that I’m color blind and a lot of color coding in Outlook is done via tinted colors, shades or glares (or whatever you like to call it).

While Outlook 2007 improved a bit on this to also place a colored border around today’s date, Outlook 2003 only shows a yellow/orange/red shaded header on today’s date while Outlook 2002/XP and previous don’t show any highlighting at all.

My personal solution to make the highlighting strike a bit more in Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 is to use a background color that works a bit better for you to see the highlighting. To change the background color of your calendar go to;
Tools-> Options…-> button Calendar Options…

In Outlook 2007, the 5th color from the top works best for me and in Outlook 2003 it is the 6th that does the trick. Play around with it until you have found your best color.

When you are using multiple Calendars, you might want to enable the option “Use selected color on all calendars” as well. Otherwise Outlook will select a different color for each Calendar that you open side-by-side or uses its internal default (the first color in the dropdown list) when you look at a different calendar than your default.

Sadly, In Outlook 2002/XP and previous, this solution will not work as Outlook will not apply calendar backgrounds to the Monthly Calendar. A thing that might help (and also works for Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007) is to press the Today button on the Toolbar or use your localized ALT+key shortcut (by default ALT+o for the English version of Outlook). This will make the selection color “jump” to today’s date which you probably will notice and can recognize where it is located in the Calendar.