Office 2013: The Missing Manual

Chapter 12. Outlook’s Address Book

Outlook is all about helping you stay in touch with the people you know. You do that with contacts, which is what Outlook calls the folks who fill up your address book. The program makes it easy to collect a biography’s worth of information for each contact: name, job info, phone numbers, email and postal addresses, notes, birthday—pretty much anything you want to track.

This chapter shows you how to work with contacts, starting with adding a new one and keeping it current. You can also import contacts from another address book (Outlook makes that easy). Once you’ve stocked your address book, you can view its contents in different ways and find that special someone you’re looking for. If you need to send emails to a group of people, like your project team, book club, or relatives who owe you money, you can gather individual contacts into a contact group and email them all at once. And if you need a printed directory, you can select a layout and print your own little portable address book.

Outlook also features the People pane, which lets you view information about a contact, including recent interactions and upcoming appointments. This pane can also be a hub for social networking with your contacts, so you can easily keep up with friends’ and colleagues activities on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.

Adding and Editing Contacts

An empty address book isn’t much help when you need to send out a memo, announcement, or the latest family news. Filling up ...