Windows 11 All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 2

Keeping Track of People

IN THIS CHAPTER

Figuring out the People app

Working through your contacts

Building a better contact list

Once upon a time, contact lists were a big deal in the PC world. Being able to keep one single list of all your contacts — and keep their addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers all up to date — was one of the most important chores for a burgeoning PC.

Those days have long passed. Nowadays, contact lists get gummed up with outdated entries and useless information. Worse, the contact lists don’t talk to each other: My contacts in Facebook, Skype, Gmail, my smartphones, Twitter, Pinterest, and Outlook just don’t talk to each other. Which is all for the better, actually, because if they did start talking to each other, there’d be some really heated arguments and lots of name-calling.

Even if your contacts are better behaved than mine, changing a detail in one place — say, a new email address in Gmail — doesn’t ripple to all the lists. Instead, it just means that one of the lists is out of sync with all the others.

I wish I could say that Microsoft has built a better contact list, but they haven’t. The Windows 11 People app is a toy app, which ...