Making the Most of the Contact Form


After you create a contact form and save it, use the A ctions menu to make use of contact information. You don't even have to open the contact to use the data: Select the contact and then choose an action from the A ctions menu. Some of the menu items are enabled only when one contact is selected; other menu items, including New M essage to Contact, work equally well when you select several contacts.

The A ctions menu on an opened contact contains four additional actions not available on the A ctions menu in Outlook: New Ins t ant Message, D isplay Map of Address, E x plore Web Page, and Add Pictu r e. If you have MapPoint installed, Outlook displays the contact's address in MapPoint. If you don't have MapPoint installed, Outlook will connect to mappoint.msn.com.

Using the A ctions menu, you can automatically use the contact data for the following actions:

  • Address a letter using Microsoft Word's letter wizard.

  • Send an email message to the contact.

  • Create meeting requests , appointments, tasks , or journal entries with the contact entered in the item's Contact field.

  • Link the contact to any Outlook item or file. When you link to a file, a journal entry is created that contains your contact information. When any other Outlook item is linked, the contact is added to the item's Contact field. When you want to see a history of your interaction with the contact, open the contact record and look on the Activities tab.

  • Call contact using a phone number entered on the contact form.

  • Map the contact's address. When MapPoint is installed, it's used for address mapping; otherwise , MSN.com maps are used, which requires an open connection to the Internet.

  • Open contact's Web page (when there is a URL on the General tab).

  • Create a new contact using the company information from the selected contact.

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One item on the Actions menu is New Distribution List. Although you would expect this to create a new distribution list containing the selected contact as the first entry, this isn't how it really works. It only opens a new, empty distribution list form. You must add contacts to create the list.


Task: Add a Photo to Your Contacts

Outlook 2003 includes an image control on the General tab of the contract form, enabling you to include a photo of the contact or the logo of the contact's company. If you don't like the icon used as the image placeholder but don't have photos for your contacts, you could use one image for personal contacts and a different one for business.

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When contacts are printed, the photo is not included on the printout.


  1. Locate the photo or image you want to use on the contact. You'll get best results with a vertical image with an aspect ratio of about 75%, but you can use any size image.

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    For best results, don't choose group pictures. If you do, you should crop the image to remove most of the background.


  2. Open the contact form and click on the image control. You can also open the Add Contact Picture dialog using the A ctions, Add Pictu r e menu selection.

  3. Select the photo and choose OK. The image control reduces the photo to fit (see Figure 10.2).

    Figure 10.2. Adding an image to your contact helps you to remember the faces of clients and adds just a couple of kilobytes to the file size of each contact.

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  4. Save and close the contact.

If you need to change the image, double-click on the image or use the A ctions, Change Pictu r e menu selection. Remove the picture using A ctions, Rem o ve Picture.

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The image control is sized 70 pixels wide by 95 high; however, you aren't limited to using an image this size. The image control will maintain the aspect ratio while shrinking a photo to fit, as shown in Figure 10.2. The original size of the photo was about 780x625.




Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
ISBN: 0672325543
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 228

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