Getting the Most Out of Contacts


Outlook's contact management modulecalled, appropriately enough, Contactsgives you amazing flexibility for dealing with your ever-growing network of colleagues, clients, friends, and family. So, yes, you can use Contacts to store mundane information such as phone numbers and addresses, but with more than 140 predefined fields available, you can preserve the minutiae of other people's lives: their birthdays and anniversaries, the names of their spouses and children, and even their nicknames.

The rest of this chapter takes you through a few useful tricks and techniques that will help you take your work in the Contacts folder to the next level.

Working with the Contacts Folder's Views

As with all of Outlook's folders, you can view your contacts in several ways. For example, you can set up the Contacts folder to group items by Company or Location. Outlook has seven predefined views for the Contacts folder:

  • Address CardsDisplays the Contacts folder as a kind of Rolodex, with each contact given its own "card" showing basic information.

  • Detailed Address CardsThis view is similar to Address Cards, but it shows more fields for each contact, including home data, web page, and notes. Also, multiline entries are displayed in full.

  • Phone ListDisplays the contacts in a table format with the fields as columns. You see the full name, company name, and phone numbers for each contact.

  • By CategoryGroups the contacts on the Categories field and displays them in a table format. Within each category, contacts are sorted by the File As field.

  • By CompanyGroups the contacts on the Company field and displays them in a table format. Within each company, contacts are sorted by the File As field.

  • By LocationGroups the contacts on the Country/Region field and displays them in a table format. Within each country, contacts are sorted by the File As field.

  • By Follow-Up FlagGroups the contacts on the Flag Status field and displays them in a table format. Within each Flag type, contacts are sorted by the File As field.

Outlook gives you three methods of changing the Contacts view:

  • Click a view option in the Current View section of the Navigation pane.

  • Select View, Arrange By, Current View, and then choose the view you want from the menu that appears.

  • Use the Current View drop-down list in the toolbar.

Custom Contacts Views

You can also create your own views of the Contacts folder. See "Defining a Custom View," earlier in this chapter, to learn how to create custom views. Note, too, that when you use any of the Table views, Outlook lets you modify the columns that are displayed in the table, as well as sort, filter, and group the appointments.


Editing Data for Multiple Contacts

If you work with a large Contacts list, it's common to have many Contacts with the same data in a particular field. For example, you might have a number of Contacts from the same company, in which case they'd all have the same Company field. Similarly, you might have a number of Contacts from a particular department, in which case the contacts would all have the same Department field. This is fine until this common data changes. For example, if the name of the company or department changes, you need to edit the appropriate field for all the affected Contacts.

You can avoid this tedious procedure by taking advantage of grouping. Here's how it works:

1.

Group the Contacts according to the field you want to change. You have two choices:

  • Select an existing view. For example, if you want to modify the Company field, select the By Company view.

  • Customize the view. Click Customize Current View, click Group By, select the field you want to work with, and click OK. (If the Group By button is disabled, it means the current view doesn't support grouping. Switch to a viewsuch as Phone Listthat supports grouping.)

2.

Select View, Expand/Collapse Groups, Collapse All Groups.

3.

Find the group that corresponds to the Contacts you want to edit, and then expand that group by clicking its plus sign (+).

4.

Edit the field in the group's first Contact. Outlook immediately adds a new group for the edited data and moves the first Contact to that group.

5.

Drag the group header for the rest of the Contacts with the old data and drop it on the group header for the new data. Outlook updates all the Contacts with the new field data.

Phoning a Contact

You can have Outlook dial your phone automatically via an attached modem. To use this feature, you need to arrange your phone cables appropriately:

  • Run one phone cable from your phone to the "Phone" jack on your modem.

  • Run a second phone cable from your modem's "Line" jack to the phone jack on your wall.

With that out of the way, select the contact you want to phone, and then do either of the following:

  • Select Actions, Call Contact.

  • Drop down the Dial button on the toolbar.

Either way, you'll see a list of commands that includes the phone number (or numbers) for the contact. Select the number you want to dial. Outlook displays the New Call dialog box, shown in Figure 5.24. Before starting your call, you can use the following options in this dialog box:

  • Open ContactClick this button to open the Contact window for the current contact.

  • Dialing PropertiesClick this button to select or change the dialing properties for Windows.

  • Dialing OptionsUse this button to set up speed-dial numbers. See the next section for details.

  • Create New Journal Entry When Starting New CallActivate this check box to create an entry in Outlook's Journal for this call.

Figure 5.24. Use the New Call dialog box to set dialing properties and initiate the call.


When you're ready to dial, click Start Call. When the Call Status reads Connected, pick up the phone and proceed with your call. When you're done, click End Call.

Redialing Recent Calls

Outlook keeps track of the last seven calls you dialed. To redial one of these numbers, select Actions, Call Contact, Redial, or drop down the Dial button and then click Redial. Select the number to redial from the cascade menu that appears.


On-the-Fly Dialing

Besides phoning specific contacts, you can also use Outlook to dial numbers on-the-fly. Select Actions, Call Contact, New Call (or press Ctrl+Shift+D) to display the New Call dialog box. Enter the phone number into the Number text box and then click Start Call.


Quick Connections with Speed Dial

If you have several contacts that you dial regularly, you can save a few steps by setting up their phone numbers in Outlook's Speed Dial feature. This places the numbers on the Speed Dial menu so that they're only a few clicks away.

To create a Speed Dial number, display the New Call dialog box. (It doesn't matter how you do this. Unfortunately, Outlook doesn't give you a direct method for defining a specific number as a Speed Dial number. It would be nice if we had an Add to Speed Dial command, but there isn't one.) Now click the Dialing Options button to display the Dialing Options dialog box, shown in Figure 5.25. Enter a name into the Name text box, enter the phone number into the Phone Number text box, and then click Add. You can add up to 20 entries.

Figure 5.25. Use the Dialing Options dialog box to define your Speed Dial numbers.


To place a call using Speed Dial, select Actions, Call Contact, Speed Dial, or drop down the Dial button and choose Speed Dial. In the menu that appears, choose the number you want to call.

Adding a Picture for a Contact

With digital cameras all the rage, sharing photos is as easy as emailing or, in the case of camera phones, making a phone call. This means it's possible you may have a picture of one or more of your contacts. If so, you can add that picture to the person's contact data. Here's how:

1.

Open the person's contact data.

2.

Select Actions, Add Picture, or click the Add Contact Picture button shown in Figure 5.26. The Add Contact Picture dialog box appears.

Figure 5.26. You can replace the Add Contact Picture button with an actual picture of your contact.


3.

Select the picture you want to use.

4.

Click OK. Outlook replaces the Add Contact Picture button with the picture you selected, as shown in Figure 5.27.

Figure 5.27. The contact with a picture added.


Displaying Contact Activity

The integrated nature of Outlook means that we often deal with people in a number of ways: read their email, send them email, have meetings with them, or include them in journal entries, notes, and tasks. Multiply all this by the dozens of other people we deal with, and finding, for instance, a particular meeting with a particular person can kill a lot of precious time.

If the person you're working with is set up as a contact, however, Outlook offers an often-overlooked method for filtering out other people and items and drilling down to the specific item you're looking for. It's called the Activities tab, and you use it as follows:

1.

Open the contact you want to work with.

2.

Display the Activities tab shown in Figure 5.28.

Figure 5.28. Use the Activities tab to see all the email messages, appointments, meetings, and other items associated with the current contact.


3.

Use the Show list to choose the specific items you want to see.

From Here

  • To learn how to use Outlook email to send Office documents to other users, see the section in Chapter 7 titled "Sharing Office Documents via Email."

  • For information on sharing calendars and performing other Outlook collaborative chores, see the section in Chapter 7 titled "Collaborating via Outlook."

  • To learn how to collaborate on documents using SharePoint, see the section in Chapter 7 titled "Using SharePoint to Collaborate on Office Documents."

  • To put your calendar on the Web for others to view, see the section in Chapter 8 titled "Publishing an Outlook Calendar to the Web."

  • To learn how to use a digital pen to create an email, see the section in Chapter 9 titled "Inking an Email Message."

  • For a few Outlook-related VBA macros, see the section in Chapter 12 titled "Outlook Macros."

  • To learn how to protect your Outlook data files, see the section in Chapter 14 titled "Assigning a Password to Your Outlook Personal Folders."

  • To get full details on the rest of Outlook's email security and privacy features, see Chapter 15, "Enhancing Outlook Email Security and Privacy."



Tricks of the Microsoft Office Gurus
Tricks of the Microsoft Office Gurus
ISBN: 0789733692
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 129

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