Part 3 in this series focuses on how to have a user-defined field appear the way you want using any characters while still keeping the actual user-defined field names as simple and clean as possible (per Part 1)
The natural tendency is to create (name) the user-defined field the way you want to see it on the custom form, or more specifically, the way you would write it in so having spaces in a field name, special characters like periods (.), single quotes (’), colons (:) would be normal. However, there is an often overlooked property that applies to user-defined fields in these cases which is the “label caption” for the newly created UDF.
When a UDF is dragged onto a custom form, there are two separate and distince elements for that field. The first is the “label” which has an associated “caption” value and can contain whatever value you wish. The second element is the field itself which is what actually is used by any 3rd party program when dealing with Outlook data. The default when creating a new user-defined field is that the label caption is the same as the field name created. Taking a few extra seconds to actually apply the “Display” name to the caption as opposed to using it as the actual field name will ensure that you have a 100% friendly set of fields that do not require the “field name” to be adjusted when used externally (as described in Part 2)
The second part of this article deals with user-defined fields defined for contacts that do not use custom forms. The primary difference in this case is that there is no “Display Name” option in this case. What you name the field is what gets displayed in the “User-defined fields in Folder” and “User-defined fields in this item” lists (found under “All Fields”)
Suggestions in this case would be to primarily use only alphnumeric characters but make the name suitably descriptive and easily readable with the use of upper and lower characters.
A very simple example illustrating the above involves a field that contains a value indicating whether or not the contact has obtained a doctorate in philosphy degree (PhD). There are any number of ways this field can be named but the following two examples show how the same field name can be created, one requiring adjustment and the other being completely friendly to any 3rd party program using the field name for file/database access:
- Has Ph.D: (requires adjustment)
- HasPhD (100% friendly)
Both of the field names above convey the exact same information in terms of what is contained in the field but option #2 guarantees that there would never be any issue with the field name regardless of the external file/database used. If you really must separate components of a name, suggest using the hyphen character (-) which is equally friendly and can be used in place of the “underscore” (_) character commonly found in database field names (the underscore (_) is an illegal Outlook field name character).
One only needs to review the internal Outlook field names versus their corresponding “Display Names”. No internal field name for any Outlook standard field contains anything other than alphanumeric characters with no spaces (see Outlook Field Names)