Abstract
Outlook includes two tools for managing addresses -- the Contacts folders and the Personal Address Book. This chapter explains why Outlook includes several ways to manage addresses, how to maintain addresses in both the Contacts folders and the PAB, and how to use the Address Book as an overall window into many address lists.
Outlook includes two tools for managing addresses — the Contacts folders and the Personal Address Book. Having two different address tools can be confusing at first, but in this chapter, we see why Outlook includes several ways to manage addresses, how to maintain addresses in both the Contacts folders and the PAB, and how to use the Address Book as an overall window into many address lists.
If you are part of an organization with its own e-mail system, you have access to addresses stored for the entire enterprise, or at least your part of it. Lists tied to your organization’s mail system — whether Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Mail, or some other system — are managed by a system administrator.
MIGRATING TO OUTLOOK
If you are moving to Outlook from Exchange or Windows Messaging, you should be happy to know that the Contacts folder addresses some of the most aggravating shortcomings of Exchange. Table 15.1 lists some of the solutions you’ll want to examine as you start working with Contacts.
UNDERSTANDING THE ADDRESS LISTS
Most of the address lists you encounter are either personal or organizational, either your own set of addresses or the roster of people where you work. You may also have access to special lists, such as all subscribers to The Microsoft Network.
Let’s take a quick look at the address lists you’re likely to encounter.
Outlook Contacts
Keep addresses for people who are not part of your organization in the Contacts folder within your Personal Folders file or Exchange Server mailbox. In addition to e-mail addresses and fax numbers, you can add notes, plus details such as telephone numbers, Web site addresses, birthdays, and even your own custom fields. If phone numbers are entered and you have a modem, you can use the Phone Dialer to dial the numbers for you. Other applications, such as Microsoft Word, can also use the information contained in the Contacts folder.
Personal Address Book
The Personal Address Book, or PAB, may be installed by default in your Outlook profile, depending on your configuration. You can have only one PAB in a profile. (See “Tips and Tricks” for a way to switch PABs without restarting Outlook.)
While the PAB has fields that are similar to some of those in Contacts, it is nowhere near as flexible. Most Outlook users will want to import the addresses from their PAB into Contacts (see “Importing a Personal Address Book” in Chapter 16).
Why does Outlook include both a Personal Address Book and Contacts folders? One reason is backward compatibility. People who have many PAB addresses from Exchange or Windows Messaging may not get around to importing them into Contacts for a while. Another is for special types of addresses, such as Public Folders, that don’t really fit into the Contacts mold (though there’s no reason you couldn’t keep an address for a public folder as a Contacts record). A third reason is that if you connect to Microsoft Exchange Server 5.0, you can use the PAB to keep track of which recipients get MIME instead of UUencode, or vice versa.
The main reason for using a PAB, though, is for personal distribution lists. These are mailing lists of people that you want to send to as a group. While you can maintain distribution lists in Contacts through categories and grouping or filters (see “Managing Contacts Distribution Lists” later in this chapter), many people find the PAB more efficient.
Organization Address Lists
Organization or enterprise address lists come in several flavors. A global address list (GAL) includes everyone in the organization (or at least everyone the mail administrator has included). In addition, you may see postoffice address lists (for Microsoft Mail) and Recipients lists (for Microsoft Exchange Server) that represent subsets of the GAL for a particular location. Finally, there may be gateway lists that show you addresses on another mail system that is linked to Microsoft Mail or Microsoft Exchange Server.
You can copy addresses from these lists to Contacts or to the PAB, but keep in mind that the addresses in those personal address lists are not updated when changes are made to the organization address lists.
If your organization uses both Microsoft Exchange Server and Outlook, you may also have a public Contacts folder that you can use just as you would your personal Contacts folder.
Other Address Lists
Different information services may add address-list functions to your profile. CompuServe and The Microsoft Network (MSN) are two examples. The CompuServe Address Book is a personal address list shared with WinCIM or other CompuServe software. This address book can contain only CompuServe addresses.
If you use MSN in its “classic” form (rather than MSN 2.5), you can access a searchable list of all MSN members. When you sign up with MSN, an entry is made in this list with your name and member ID. You also can add personal and professional information about yourself that other members can view. Here’s how:
Connect to MSN.
In Outlook, choose Tools, Address Book, or click the Address Book button.
In the Address Book dialog box, under Show Names, choose The Microsoft Network. (If you don’t see this address list, you are not using the classic MSN service and won’t be able to access the MSN address list.)
Choose Tools, Find.
In the Find dialog box, enter your Member ID or Name, then click OK.
When the search is completed, double-click the address to bring up its properties.
On the General, Personal, and Professional tabs, enter information you want other MSN members to be able to see, then click OK to save it.
You can also use the Find dialog box to search for other MSN members, perhaps looking for those in your area or with similar interests.
MANAGING OUTLOOK CONTACTS
The Contacts folder, like the Inbox and other mailbox folders, offers multiple views and many different ways to organize and manage new and existing contacts.
Viewing Contacts
When you switch to the Contacts folder (Figure 15.1), you see a view that’s very different from the Inbox. This is a card-type view, showing contacts as individual cards, with alphabetical navigation buttons on the right. This Address Cards view is one of six views for Contacts that come with Outlook, listed in Table 15.2. You can devise more views, of course; see “Customizing Folders” in Chapter 9 if you need a refresher.
Items in the Address Cards view are initially sorted by the File As field. You can use the name, company, or anything else in this field (maybe “dentist” for the new dentist whose name you can never recall).
To change the fields shown on the cards, choose View, Show Fields. Add the fields you want to see on the cards and remove those you don’t want to see. For example, the default Address Cards view does not include the Company name, which is one field you might want to add right away.
In the Address Cards view, the fastest way to move to a particular record is to type in the first few letters of the name that the contact is filed under. Outlook takes you directly to the first card that matches. You can also use the scroll bar to browse through the records, click the alphabetical buttons, or use Tools, Find Items for a more detailed search (see “Using the Find Tools” in Chapter 14).
Adding a Contact
Click the New Contact button or choose File, New, Contact to open a new Contact record (Figure 15.2), containing four tabs of information. (You don’t need to be in the Contacts folder to use this technique to add a contact. Also, don’t forget that you can add a contact by copying it from an incoming e-mail message. See “Adding Addresses” in Chapter 11.) Table 15.3 lists the toolbar buttons found on the Contact window.
Type in the Full Name of a new contact you want to enter. After you enter the name and move to another field, a feature called AutoName goes to work, breaking the name into first and last names. You can see the result of this in the File as field, where you have a choice of displaying the contact with last name first or by the first name. If AutoName doesn’t parse the name correctly, click Full Name to enter the parts of the name one by one in the Check Full Name dialog box (Figure 15.3).
Something similar happens when you type in an Address. AutoAddress breaks it into components, making it possible for you to later sort by city or state, without having to tediously enter city and state in separate fields. If Outlook detects an address that seems incomplete, it pops up the Check Address dialog box (Figure 15.4), where you can enter the details field by field.
You can also click Address to display the Check Address dialog box any time you want to check exactly what Outlook has entered in the individual address fields. You will see that a country is entered automatically. If you don’t include a country in an address, Outlook enters the country chosen for the regional settings on your computer. (Change the regional settings with the Regional Settings applet in the Control Panel.)
Entering Phone Numbers
The General tab also lets you display up to four phone numbers, with more than a dozen different types of numbers to choose from. For example, for some contacts, instead of Mobile, you might want to display Assistant, for the number for the contact’s assistant.
If you plan to send faxes or use automatic dialing with the phone numbers in Contacts and take advantage of Windows dialing properties (see “Configuring Dialing Locations” in Chapter 2), enter numbers in international format — that is, as +xx (yyy) zzz-zzzz, where xx is the country code, yyy is the area or city code, and zzz-zzzz is the local number.
As we noted in Chapter 13, a common problem occurs when a U.S. or Canadian city has more than one area code and the usual “1” for long-distance numbers must be omitted. You need to “lie” to Windows to make these numbers work in Outlook. For example, say you live in Atlanta in area code 404, but often dial numbers in neighboring area code 770 that don’t need a long-distance “1.” Enter such numbers like this:
+1 (404) 770-zzz-zzzz
where zzz-zzzz is the local number.
Because this number is in international format, Windows applies the Dialing Properties. The +1 country code matches your dialing location. So does the (404) area code. Therefore, it treats 770-zzz-zzzz as a local number, adding only whatever local access or call waiting codes you have in the Dialing Properties, or perhaps applying a calling card.
Another way to accomplish the same thing is to enter the number exactly as you want Outlook to dial it, including a 9 or another prefix to access an outside line. Complicating this technique, though, is an Outlook feature that automatically adds the country and area code to your number when you enter it. However, if you precede the number with a comma, Outlook won’t automatically reformat it. See “Phone Number Masking,” page 348.
Phone Number Masking
For more than 50 countries, Outlook automatically formats the numbers you enter into international format. For automatic formatting to occur, you must have the dialing location set up correctly, and you must enter the number in a format that Outlook recognizes as valid for that country.
For example, local numbers in Australia are 8 digits long. Let’s say you’re in area code 02. If you enter an 8-digit number, such as 87878765, Outlook formats it as +61 (02) 8787-8765, adding the +61 country code and (02) area code automatically, based on your dialing location.
In the U.S., according to Microsoft, any of these entry formats should trigger this phone number masking feature:
eleven digits for international telephone numbers
ten digits for telephone numbers outside your local area code
seven digits for telephone numbers within your local area code
Unfortunately, there’s no list giving the acceptable formats for all countries. You may need to apply a little trial-and-error for your particular location. If you see the area code being added but not the country code, you can set Outlook to add the code for your country:
Choose Tools, Options, then switch to the General tab.
On the General tab in the Options dialog box, click Dialing Options.
In the Dialing Options dialog box, select “Automatically add country code to local phone numbers.”
Click OK twice to save the change.
There’s no easy way to turn off phone number masking when you don’t want the numbers formatted automatically. One workaround is to temporarily switch your dialing location to another country while you enter a batch of numbers. Another approach is to start the number with a comma. Outlook interprets this as a brief pause, then dials the number exactly as you entered it, without applying the properties from the current dialing location.
Entering E-mail Addresses
If you imported entries from your PAB or another source (see Chapter 16 for more about importing and exporting information), many of the entries in Contacts may already have an e-mail address.
For new records, select E-mail, E-mail 2, or E-mail 3 from the drop-down list, then enter the e-mail address using one of these methods:
Enter the address in the box provided. For an Internet address outside your organization, use the format name@domain. For an Internet address within your organization, use [SMTP:name].
For other addresses, enter the address using the appropriate syntax shown in Table 10.2 in Chapter 10. For example, use [COMPUSERVE:75140,544] to add a CompuServe address.
To add an address from either your PAB or an organizational address list, click the address book button next to the box. Then, on the Select Name dialog box, select the address you want to use and click OK. You can also click New to create a new address for most address types.
Remember that an address imported from an organizational address book isn’t automatically updated in your Contacts folder when the address changes.
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