How to quickly create an Outlook Contact Group from existing contacts

Crating a Contact group involves selecting one contact at a time which can be somewhat of a time consuming process especially if multiple contact groups need to be created. There is however a way to create Contact Group selecting multiple contacts either assigned to a particular category or filtered in any other way using the following steps

1. open the contact folder where the contacts reside
2. change the view to an already filtered set of contacts (see: How to organize contacts – Part 2 – Categories – Contact Groups) or simply change the current view to add a desired filter to select the desired contacts
3. change the columns in the view to only show the contact’s name and email address 
   – you cannot select the Email DisplayName that contains an email address
   – if only the email address is selected, it will insert the contact’s Email DisplayName in the <Name> field
   – if you add an email address to item #5 that does not exist in Outlook without including a name, the email adddress will be used as the name
4. press CTRL+A in the contact folder after the view has been applied –> right-click the selected contacts –> copy
5. open a text editor (i.e. NotePad) and <paste> the copied items in what will be a 2 columns – tab-delimited
6. remove the first line which contains the field names –> highlight everything –> copy
7. in Outlook, click on the New Contact Group button or press CTRL+SHIFT+L (or alternatively open an existing Contact Group)
8. Select <Add members> in the Contact Group screen and paste the data from Step #6 in the <Members> field

Visual view

Step #3 – Change the columns in the view from something similar as shown below 

to either one column showing the email address or 2 column where the first is the <Name> followed by <Email Address>

Step #4 – highlight all desired items & copy

Step #5&6 – Paste into a text editor and remove the header line, then select all and <copy>

Step #7&8 – Paste data from step#6 into <Members> field

The result 

Tags: Outlook contact groups

Category: Outlook - How To