Sharing Your Contacts

Outlook is great for storing your contact records and if you use Exchange Server, it's great for sharing your contacts with co-workers . You can even share your contacts with people who don't use Outlook by saving your contacts as vCards.

Like vCals, vCards are an Internet standard for sharing contact records and a number of programs in addition to Outlook use vCards. A vCard is a plain-text file with the *.vcf extension. When you open a vCard in Notepad, it is formatted as shown in the following example:

 BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:2.1 N:White;Collette FN:Collette White TITLE:Sales Manager TEL;WORK;VOICE:[phone] ADR;WORK:;;;123 E Main;St;;United States of America LABEL;WORK;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:123 E Main, St=0D=0AUnited States of America EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:[e-mail] REV:20030626T025116Z END:VCARD 

You could create a vCard using Notepad and save it with the .vcf extension and it would work in all programs that support vCards. However, it's easier to let Outlook do the conversion for you.

After selecting a contact from your Outlook contact list, use F ile, Save A s to open the Save As dialog box. Then select vCard (*.vcf) from the Save As Type drop-down list and click Save. Alternatively, select one or more contacts and use Actions, Forward As vCard to send your contacts by email to another person.

Along with sharing your contacts digitally, you can print phone directories or address lists to give to others. One of the easiest ways to print a list is directly from Outlook. Create a custom view with the fields showing that you want to share. Use Outlook's built-in printing capabilities to print a directory, or Select A l l, C opy and P aste into Notepad, Word, or Excel and print.