How to organize Outlook contacts – Part 2 – Categories – Contact Groups
This is the second of two segments with the focus is on organizing contacts by using Categories and Contact Groups. (For segment 1 – see How to organize Outlook contacts – Part 1 – Multiple Folders)
Categories
Using categories to segment contacts is probably one of the most flexible approaches available. When categories are consistently assigned, it enables a single contact to be a member of multiple “groups” (i.e. Business, Personal, Club Member etc) similar to having created the same contacts in different contact folders. The primary benefit being that there is no duplication of information, or to be more specific, you only need to add a contact once which also means that you only need make a change to the contact’s information once. In essence, when the use of categories is properly implemented, it is the equivalent of seeing “multiple” (or virtual) contact folders at the same time from within a single folder.
The process by which this is accomplished is changing the view to “group” by category which will result in a heading for each category and contacts assigned to a given category will be then listed underneath. A contact assigned to multiple groups will appear under each category that it was a assigned to.
For example, opening a contact folder with view set to group by category would look similar to
All groups collapsed
Contact with multiple categories assigned
If you don’t want all the groups to appear, then that can be accomplished by creating a custom view and filtering which category(ies) appear in the folder.
Setting a <View>’s grouping and filter settings
Open the desired contact folder –> select <View> ribbon from the menu –> click on <View Settings>
To create a custom view
Select <Change View> –> <Manage Views> –> <New>
Contact Groups (formerly known as <Distribution Lists>)
Contact Groups enable you to send emails to a pre-defined set of contacts/email addresses. Contact Groups are really not intended to be used for more then 100 contacts at most. Using a Contact Group really makes sense if you send to the same set of contacts on a regular basis and the list doesn’t constantly keep changing.
Things to note about Contact Groups
- a Contact Group is a special type of contact item (regular contacts use the message class of <IPM.Contact> (or IPM.Contact.CustomFormname when a custom form is applied) whereas a Contact Group has a message class of <IPM.Distlist>
- only the display name and email address are shown. Fields cannot be added nor can the list be sorted
- CG membership can be an existing contact, an adhoc member, or a member of an Exchange Global AddressList
- deleting a contact item that is also a member of a Contact Group does not delete the contact from any associated group. Deleting a contact item results in it becoming an “adhoc” member in the Contact Groups it’s a member of.
- Contact Groups are not included when exporting contacts
- there is no built-in facility to determine which Contact Groups a contact item is a member of
- Outlook doesn’t impose a limit on the size of a Contact Group that can used to send a message but you should always remember that your ESP (email service provider) may impose limits on the number of recipients can be included in a single message or the total number of messages that can be sent out over a period of time. While you may only be sending out one message via Outlook to a Contact Group consisting of 100 contacts, that in effect is 100 messages as far as your ESP is concerned. In short, if you receive an error message when sending a message, it is very likely being returned from your ESP’s server and not Outlook
- if you do not want all the recipients to see everyone else’s emal address in the group, the enter the Contact Group in the BCC field of the message
Contact Groups vs Mail-Merge
An alternative to using Contact Groups is <Mail Merge>. While this entails a few more steps, it does provide some advantages such as
- will appear that the message was sent only to that individual
- messages can be sent to only those contacts that appear in a specific category or meet the criteria for any kind of filter set for the contact folder (doesn’t require categories to be used)
- messages can be customized with the individual’s name (or any other value from a contact field)
Unlike “ad-hoc” members of a contact group, contacts must exist in order to be included in a <Mail Merge>
Category: Outlook - How To
