It’s not unusual to have several contacts that have one or more fields in common. For example, if you deal with a number of people from a particular company, those contacts have the same value in the Company field, and they may also all have the same values in the Web Page Address, Business Phone Number, Business Fax, and Business Address fields.
What happens, however, when the value in a common field changes? For example, the company might change its name or move to a different address. If you only have a couple of contacts that are affected by the change, it’s no big deal to update the contact data by hand. However, what if you have half a dozen or more contacts with the same data? Updating all those contacts by hand is a tedious chore, at best. Fortunately, you can take advantage of a trick that enables you to edit all of the affected contacts at once.
You begin by organizing your Contacts folder into groups according to the field you want to change. The easiest way to do this is to select an existing view that corresponds to the changing field. For example, if you’re changing the Company field, then you’d click By Company in The Current View section of the Navigation Pane. If Outlook doesn’t have a view for the field you want to change, you can create it yourself:
- Choose View, Current View, Define Views. The Custom View Organizer dialog box displays.
- Click New. The Create a New View dialog box displays.
- Use the Name of New View text box to name the view (for example, By Field, where Field is the name of the field you want to modify), make sure Table is selected in the Type of View list, and then click OK. The Customize View dialog box displays.
- Click Group By to display the Group By dialog box.
- In the Group Items By list, click the field you want to modify.
- Click OK to return to the Customize View dialog box.
- Click OK to return to the Custom View Organizer dialog box.
- In the Views for folder ‘Contacts’ list, click your new view.
- Click Apply View.
With your contacts grouped on the field you want to work with, you are now ready to make the change. Here are the steps to follow:
- Choose View, Expand/Collapse Groups, Collapse All Groups. The Contacts folder now shows only the group headers.
- Locate the group that contains the contacts you want to edit, and then expand that group by clicking its plus sign (+).
- Edit the field in the group’s first contact. Outlook immediately adds a new group for the edited data and moves the first contact into that group.
- Drag the group header for the rest of the Contacts with the old data and drop it on the group header for the new data (see Figure 1). Outlook updates all the Contacts with the new field data.
Figure 1 When you drag one group into another, Outlook updates the group field to the value in the new group.
Technorati Tags: editing multiple contacts, outlook 2007
Popularity: 30% [?]
July 31st, 2008 at 5:48 am
This did not work for me. Do you have to have Outlook Contact Business Manager for this to work? When I edited the field in the first contact, Outlook did not immediately add a new group.
August 9th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
I didn’t have that problem and I have regular Outlook – not the BCM add-on. If you group the contacts by Company, and then change the “Company” field for the first contact in a list of multiple contacts, then a new Company category should appear. Then you should be able to drag any other contacts that you want to have the new Company listed and it will change automatically
September 11th, 2008 at 7:43 am
Worked like a charm. Thanks!
September 16th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
It created the new group with no problem. But then would not let me drag the old group which I wanted to mass update into the newly created group. Any ideas?
November 19th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
A very helpful tip, this worked great for me. Thank you.
November 20th, 2008 at 2:41 am
Same Here….It created the new group with no problem. But then would not let me drag the old group which I wanted to mass update into the newly created group. Any ideas?
November 25th, 2008 at 2:25 am
This was so easy – i’m kicking myself that I waited this long to get help on this tedious chore. thanks!
December 15th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
I knew this trick – but I do not only need to update ONE piece of information – I would sometimes like to change all the adresses as well. There got to be a smarter way around this?
December 27th, 2008 at 2:29 am
Worked great! Simple solution… thanks!
February 5th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
It was very useful. Thank you very much!
February 10th, 2009 at 2:22 am
I need to change the domain name portion of over 300 contacts email addresses. Would love to do a find/replace. Can that be done in Outlook 2007? We changed from @sfcc.edu to @SFCollege.edu. Any easy way to do that?
February 13th, 2009 at 2:08 am
Great tip! This worked great for me!
February 14th, 2009 at 5:30 am
That worked great! Thank you! That will save me tons of time in the future!
April 7th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Worked perfectly. Am moving contacts from different sources into outlook with bcm. Batch categorising Has saved me hours.
May 13th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
Worked well! thanks a lot!!!
June 20th, 2009 at 7:43 am
Why not have a flag to allow excel type editing. This is so convoluted.
July 17th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
How does one add a spouses name and what about a salutation?
August 6th, 2009 at 12:50 am
Well, all the company names for a group of contacts has been updated, but there are still all those email addresses which need the domain name changed. Is there a way to change all at once from the format first.last@oldname.com to first.last@newname.com?
August 6th, 2009 at 9:44 am
Great, worked marvelously! you saved me a lot of time. Lots of contacts from two companies that merged under a new name.
Thanks!!!
August 8th, 2009 at 1:31 am
This sucks. I want to make a small change to every phone number in the entire database by removing the +1–Not give every contact the very same phone number. This is the stupidest global fix I have ever seen in any software. It is not a fix, it is a complicated multi-step nightmare. Outlook people should study ACT! and learn something about useful business databases. Believe me we would still be with ACT if it were not such a hog and expensive to maintain. Outlook does not do 10 percent of the most useful tools of ACT. Catch up would you!!!
August 25th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
I have been manually changing every contact card — save as file in order to work with company cell phone. Would this application work for this group also?
September 30th, 2009 at 10:10 am
Great Article! It worked perfectly for me
I’ve been looking for a way to do this for MONTHS!
Thanks!
October 20th, 2009 at 9:13 am
I couldn’t find an answer to e-mailing the same message to contacts at one time; there was one for sending multiple copies.
Is it the same as “mail merge”
November 6th, 2009 at 1:46 am
Perfect! That is very helpful. I created a new group and updated over 35,000 contacts by clicking and dragging the group heading into the newly created group heading.
This took a very long time (about 10 hours). Does anyone know how I may be able to speed up the process in the future?