Managing Your List of Contacts
Outlook's Contacts folder serves a dual purpose: For Internet mail users, it's the primary storage location for e-mail addresses. It's also a useful place to store names, addresses, phone numbers, and other important information about friends, family members, and business associates. If you use the Contacts folder only to manage e-mail addresses and occasionally print an address book, it will certainly be worth the minimal effort it takes to enter and update contact information. But if you're willing to learn Outlook's secrets, you can make it do much more. For example, you can
Quickly add addresses to letters and envelopes you create with Word. After you master the quirks of the Outlook Address Book, you can configure each entry so names and addresses appear in the correct format.
Build lists of related contacts for use in mail merge projects.
Dial your phone and log calls automatically. If you provide professional services and bill by the hour, Outlook can track the time you spend on the phone with each contact, for later billing.
Flag one Contact item or a group for a follow-up reminder.
Use categories to print specialized phone books. If you frequently travel to another city, for example, enter names, phone numbers, and notes for your favorite restaurants in that city, and then print a list of just those items before you leave.
→ The Contacts folder and the Outlook Address Book offer different views of the same information; for full details, see "Configuring the Outlook Address Book".
By default, the Contacts folder opens in Address Cards view, shown in Figure 12.1. This view includes the contact's name (as defined in the File As field), plus the mailing address and as many phone numbers as you've defined for the contact. This view lets you see a fairly large number of records at one time, but it doesn't display company or job title information.
Figure 12.1. The default Address Cards view packs the maximum number of records onto the screen by displaying only essential address and phone information.
To see more information about each contact, switch to the Detailed Address Cards view, which displays virtually all fields in each contact record.
→ Outlook provides a variety of options for sorting and filtering your Outlook items; see "Using Views to Display, Sort, and Filter Items".