Office 2007 Bible

Understanding Outlook Contacts

Outlook’s Contacts feature is one of its most powerful features. At heart, the Contacts feature is just an address book, but what an address book! Of course, it covers the basics of organizing names, addresses, and phone numbers, but it can do so much more. Many people use Contacts primarily as a way to store people’s e-mail addresses for ease of sending e-mails. This is important, but if that’s all you use Contacts for, you are really missing out. For example, you should know that you can use Outlook Contacts to

• Create electronic business cards so that you can send your or other people’s contact information by e-mail

• Store multiple phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and postal address for an individual

• Perform an automated mail merge, creating a mailing to some or all of your contacts

• Automatically dial a contact’s phone number (if your computer is equipped with a modem)

• Store a photograph as part of a contact’s information

• Define custom fields to store whatever information you need as part of a contact

• View a map of the location of a contact’s address

After you understand all the power of Outlook contacts, you can use as many or as few of its features as you like.

Note that Personal Address Books, a feature available in earlier versions of Outlook, is no longer supported.