Manage Your Life with Outlook®: for Dummies®

Chapter 11. Using Contacts to Stay in Touch

Although, the Contacts module comes third in the series of Outlook's major components, most folks treat this module as if it were number two on the list — right there behind Mail. Very few Outlook e-mail users are completely unfamiliar with its rudimentary features, and many use it to maintain their entire online address book.

In terms of personal productivity, the most important aspects of using the Contacts module include the ability to efficiently generate new records that store all the vital information you need about a new person or business, create new e-mail messages from existing contact records, and use views and categories to filter and sort your contacts list both for printing and exporting to other applications such as Microsoft Word for mail merge production. You can find all these aspects of using the Outlook Contacts module covered in this chapter.

Adding New Contacts Like a Pro

Outlook makes it a snap to add a new contact to your address book. If you're in the Contacts module, you simply press Ctrl+N to open an Untitled – Contact dialog box (similar to the one shown in Figure 11-1). If you're in any other Outlook module, you press Ctrl+Shift+C to open this same dialog box.

Figure 11-1. Adding basic information for a new contact using the fields on the General tab of the Outlook 2003 Contact dialog box.

If you happen to be in the ...