Outlook 2000 in a Nutshell

Using Outlook’s Editors

Until now, we’ve been dealing with Outlook’s global/default editor settings. In the following section we are going to show you some tips and tricks related to using Outlook’s editors, as well as describe how to stray from the default settings you’ve so carefully tweaked without delving back into option dialogs.

Addressing a Message

Addressing a message in Outlook is a reasonably straightforward process, right? Well, yes and no. It is if you only have two or three contacts you communicate with regularly, or if you have a good memory for names and their spelling. But as your contacts file grows, so do the number of Johns and Bills and Marys. And then there’s your friend Dan who has three email addresses: one for business, one for home, and one he keeps for a spare when the other two aren’t working.

Like everything else in Outlook, you can use two approaches to getting the address you want entered in a new message: brute force, and cunning. We’ll show you the brute force approach for completeness, but this section focuses on the cunning—quick shortcuts that save time, effort, and keystrokes.

Brute force first. When you can’t remember any part of Whatshisname’s name, maybe looking at a list will help jog your memory. On the new message form, click the To button next to the address field. This opens the Select Names dialog shown in Figure 5-25.

Note

The Select Names dialog displays the contents of your Contacts folder and contains the same dataset used by the Windows ...