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The Microsoft Outlook Ideas Book
The Microsoft Outlook Ideas Book

The Microsoft Outlook Ideas Book: How to organise and manage yourself, your team, and your activities with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange with this book and eBook

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The Microsoft Outlook Ideas Book

Chapter 2. The Contacts Folder

The conventional use of the Contacts folder is to store the details of people with whom you communicate. However, with a little imagination, Contacts folders can be used to store and manipulate the details of almost anything.

In this chapter, we will look at the following examples of useful, unusual, and practical customizations of conventional Outlook contact data:

  • A table of Distribution Lists that displays the dates on which they were created

  • A Business Directory of Suppliers

  • A Staff Contacts folder that calculates length of service and leave entitlement

  • A Contacts folder for Company Vehicles

A Distribution Lists View

Distribution Lists are created to make it easy to send one email to several recipients. These recipients would all have a common interest in the email that you are sending and are often therefore members of specific groups, regular meetings, committees, etc. But these groups can have finite life spans and you can find that you accumulate Distribution...

A Distribution Lists View


Distribution Lists are created to make it easy to send one email to several recipients. These recipients would all have a common interest in the email that you are sending and are often therefore members of specific groups, regular meetings, committees, etc. But these groups can have finite life spans and you can find that you accumulate Distribution Lists that are out of date and defunct. To assist in identifying the current validity of your Distribution Lists, we will create a view of your Contacts folder showing the dates on which the Distribution Lists were created.

If you have a large number of Distribution Lists, you could either create a separate Contacts folder to store only Distribution Lists or use a view of your main Contacts folder that filters Distribution Lists. As Outlook does not provide a predefined view for Distribution Lists, the following custom view not only filters Distributions Lists but also includes the Created field to show the date on...

A View of Suppliers of Goods or Services


We will begin with creating the Contacts view.

Creating the Contacts View

  1. 1. Create a Contacts folder specifically for the details of your contacts at companies that supply goods or services, named Suppliers.

  2. 2. Create Categories for your supplier companies that describe, in general terms, their trade or profession. For example, Architects, Lawyers, Building Supplies, etc.

  3. 3. Create a new table-type view from the Define Views | New option and name the view Business Directory.

  4. 4. In the View Summary dialog box, click Fields, and select the fields: Company, Full Name, Email, Country/Region, Business Phone, Business Fax, and Mobile Phone, and click OK.

  5. 5. Create a new manual field as follows:

    Field

    Type

    Format

    Purpose

    Commodity

    Text

    Text

    To record the specific commodities or services that each supplier provides, e.g. Category = Architects, Commodity = Major Projects > 10m

  6. 6. Set Group By to Categories and then by Commodity.

What Just Happened...

Creating Views of Staff Data


When you are constructing a new view, you may find that too many fields result in the viewing area being cramped and data not being easily visible. In this case, consider combining related fields into one new field. For example, you may want to include the contact details of the next of kin in your view of staff data, in which case, create a new combination field as follows:

Option

Value

Name

Next of Kin

Type

Combination

Formula

Edit

Fields

[Spouse] ~ [Home Phone]

There is a vast amount of information that can be held about staff that would be useful to store in one place, and Outlook can be that place. Outlook can store not only contact information, but also information about the company equipment that is issued to staff members e.g. mobile phones, laptops, and cars; about staff length of service and leave entitlement; about training and courses attended; about salary progression, commission and bonuses, etc.

The examples we will now...

A Length of Service and Leave Entitlement View


We will now describe how to create a new view of a Contacts Folder called Length of Service that will show the length of service and the amount of leave that each staff member is entitled to. This information will enable us to enter the correct leave entitlement into the Entitlement field in the Staff Leave calendar that we created in the last chapter.

The following view should be created in the Contacts folder that contains staff data and the view utilizes the details of a company policy that allows staff members the following numbers of days leave depending on their length of service:

No of years service

No of days leave

10 years or more

30 days

5 years or more

25 days

Less than 5 years

22 days

Creating the Contacts View

  1. 1. Create a new table-type view from the Define Views | New option and name the view Length of Service.

  2. 2. In the View Summary dialog box, click Fields, and select the fields: Full Name, and Job Title, and click OK.

  3. 3...

A Contacts Folder for Company Vehicles


Let’s now take a real leap of imagination and consider that if our company has a fleet of vehicles, why can’t we store the details in a Contacts folder? These details could include the make, model, year of manufacture, registration number, mileage, and date of service; perhaps we could even get Outlook to remind us when the vehicles should be serviced.

This amount of very specific data would need to be held in a separate Contacts folder. So the first action would be to create a new suitably named Contacts folder, not for people but for company cars.

Creating the Contacts View

Rather than modify an existing view, create a new view as follows:

  1. 1. Create a new table type view from the Define Views | New option and name the view Company Vehicles.

  2. 2. In the View Summary dialog box, click Fields, and select the fields: Full Name, Birthday, and Contacts and click OK.

  3. 3. We will now create the following five new manual fields:

Name

Type

Format

Purpose

Make...

Summary


We have so far explored some unusual uses for the Outlook Calendar and some extraordinary ways to manipulate the Contacts folder. Hopefully by now you are beginning to sense that we have been gathering together the ingredients and the techniques that are the building blocks that will shape the unique solutions in the final chapter. The next building block is Tasks and we shall be exploring ways to utilize Tasks in the next chapter.

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Key benefits

  • Packed with ideas of how all Outlook users can create useful solutions you never thought possible
  • Step by step instructions for storing and extracting information from the Calendar, Contacts and Tasks folders to create integrated business solutions
  • Great ideas for business, personal, educational and home users

Description

Microsoft Outlook, in tandem with Microsoft Exchange Server, provides a powerful environment for sharing information. This book will show you how to take advantage of that to construct solutions for your business or organization from the features of Outlook. This book is a collection of scenarios that incorporate and link many Outlook components to produce surprisingly powerful functionality. Without the need for code or specially-written applications, you will be extracting information from your Outlook Calendar, Contacts and Tasks folders to create solutions like these: Monitoring staff leave and printing schedules Managing meeting rooms and printing invoices Managing fleet vehicles, their records, and servicing Managing a school class calendar, student records, attendance, assignments, and reports

Who is this book for?

This book is for users who are comfortable with the basic functions of Outlook, but who want inspiration and direction on manipulating its features to produce powerful methods of viewing, presenting and reporting the wealth of information that it can hold. Users of Microsoft Access and Excel will recognize the functions and constructs used in some of the examples. The techniques in this book are applicable to all versions of Outlook from 2000 upwards. Where there are functional differences between the versions, these have been noted. You need to be running Outlook with MS Exchange Server to use this book

What you will learn

  • How to apply the features of Outlook to avoid transferring and duplicating data into other programs
  • How to expand your view of Outlook and its capabilities
  • Techniques that will enable you to create your own solutions that are relevant to your situation and environment
  • The confidence and vision to explore and use existing software to develop your own solutions
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Table of Contents

4 Chapters
The Calendar Folder Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
The Contacts Folder Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
The Tasks Folder Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Whole Solutions Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
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