Ms Office Tune Up

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:

1. Choose View, Current View, Define Views. The Custom View Organizer dialog box displays.
2. Click New. The Create a New View dialog box displays.
3. 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.
4. Click Group By to display the Group By dialog box.
5. In the Group Items By list, click the field you want to modify.
6. Click OK to return to the Customize View dialog box.
7. Click OK to return to the Custom View Organizer dialog box.
8. In the Views for folder ‘Contacts’ list, click your new view.
9. 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:

1. Choose View, Expand/Collapse Groups, Collapse All Groups. The Contacts folder now shows only the group headers.
2. Locate the group that contains the contacts you want to edit, and then expand that group by clicking its plus sign (+).
3. 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.
4. 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.

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