Troubleshooting

Don't Remind Me of Birthdays

When I enter a new contact, Outlook always wants to put that contact's birthday and anniversary as recurring annual events in my calendar. How can I stop this behavior?

Unfortunately, there's no easy way to turn off Outlook's creation of birthdays and anniversaries. However, you can turn off the default reminder before creating a new contact. This still creates an event for the contact's birthday and anniversary, but you won't be reminded of those events. You can also select the Annual Events view of your Calendar folder to view a list of all annual events. This view lists all birthdays and anniversaries for all of your contacts. Select the events you want to delete and then delete them. This view also displays other annual events that you've entered, such as company holidays, so be careful to delete only the events you don't want in your calendar.

Where's My Custom Field?

I created several custom fields in the All Fields page of the contact form. I can enter data in the fields, but how can I display the data in my contact form or Contacts folder?

The only way to display these fields in your contact form is to create a custom contact form.

For more information about creating custom Outlook forms, see "Creating and Using Custom Forms," p. 757.

You can edit the view of your Contacts folder to display your new custom field. To add the custom field to the Phone List view of your Contacts folder, select View, Arrange By, Current View, Customize Current View to display the Customize View dialog box. Click the Fields button to display a list of all fields in your view. Use the drop-down box marked Select Available Fields From and choose the User-Defined Fields in Folder field set. You should then see a list of all custom fields in the left text box. Add any custom fields you want by selecting the field name and then clicking the Add button to move the field to the Show Fields text box. You can change the display order of the fields by using the Move Up and Move Down buttons. Click OK twice to apply your changes and see your new view.

Unexpected Display Names

When I create a new contact record using AutoCreate or Add to Contacts from an email message, the display names are often not what I expect. Why?

The display name entered for a contact depends on several settings. When you create your email account in Outlook, you can enter your full name. Even though the field is marked Full Name, you can really enter anything you want a nickname, just your first name, or even a phrase. When you receive an email from someone, the sender's display name is configured to be the name she entered in the Full Name field when configuring her email account. This is why you often see display names that don't match the email addresses.

When you add a new contact record using AutoCreate or Add to Contacts from an email message, Outlook uses the person's preconfigured display name as its default display name. You can change this display name to any other nickname or the person's full name.