Outlook is an email client, but it is sometimes also known as the information manager. That’s because it does more than manage your emailing needs. It also has a complete feature for managing calendar needs, like adding events and appointments, tasks, notes, and also contacts. In this article, we will learn more about the Outlook feature for managing your contacts.
People or Address Book In Outlook
Outlook now calls its feature for address book simply ‘People.’ By going into ‘People’ section, you can see all your contacts from different email clients.
Note that when you add a new IMAP account like Gmail, only emails are downloaded and synced, not calendar or contacts. But if you add an account that is on Exchange server, even including the free ones like Hotmail.com and Outlook.com, it includes emails, contacts, calendar, and tasks as well.
To go to “People” in Outlook (by default, Outlook should open in ‘Mail’), click on the ‘People’ icon at the bottom navigation list.
Then, on the left you will see your accounts. If you have never imported any contacts to Outlook, you will only see your Exchange accounts. On the right, you will see your list of contacts. If you click a contact, then on the extreme right, you will see the details of that contact.
How to add a new contact
When you are on the ‘People’ section in Outlook, there is an option to add a new contact on the ‘home’ tab that says “New Contact.” Click on it and then fill in the details in the new contact window that appears.
When all the details are filled, click on “Save and Close.” The contact will be saved under the account that had selected when you clicked on “New Contact.”
Contact
A contact is more than just a name and email address. Outlook treats each contact like a business card and you can modify your contacts in the same way. You can add their websites, personal addresses, phone numbers, and even a picture. On the right, Outlook automatically creates a graphical-based business card that makes the whole address book management more efficient. It also makes sharing a business card/contact quicker and more helpful.
If you want to add more fields than are available by default, just click on the dropdown arrow button to add more fields, like email 2, email 3, and so on.
You can also add any email address from your mails by right-clicking the email address and clicking on “Add to Outlook Contacts.” You can also do that from email headers like To, From, Cc, Bcc, etc. Just right click and click on Add to Outlook contacts. The email address will be automatically added to the field. You can then enter other information if you want. Once all that is done, click on “save” below to save the contact and close the box.
It will be saved under whichever account the email was in.
We hope that the above information presented here gives you a basic but clear idea of how contacts in Outlook are supposed to work and how you can add and modify them.
Outlook can come in real handy for not just sending emails but also to arrange your contacts in an efficient way. You can also do a lot more than what we discussed here, such as creating new contact groups and using those groups to send quick mails to everyone in it without having to manually add the email address for each individual person. In our next post, we will discuss how to do that and more.