Use Categories to Manage Contacts in Microsoft Outlook 2007

Use Categories to Manage Contacts in Microsoft Outlook 2007
It is not difficult to harvest hundreds or even thousands contacts from social media, e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace.  How you can manage such vast amount of information would become a major challenge.  Microsoft Outlook 2007 provides color categories to easily group and identify contacts.
Before you assign categories to contacts, you may want to rename default categories or add new categories to match your business needs.

Rename Default Categories / Add New Categories
·         On the Actions menu, point to Categorize, and then click All Categories.
·         Select a category and click Rename button.

If you want to add a new category, click the New… button.

 

After you configure the Color Categories, you can now assign categories to contacts.

Assign Color Categories to Contact

• From the Go menu, select Contacts
  
  
• Select the contact that you want to add categories, right click on it
  
  
• Select Categorize and pick the category you want, e.g. “Newsletter”.
  
  

   

   
  

  If you want to choose more than 1 category, select All Categories…
    

Select the categories and click the OK button.

View Contacts by Category
You can see the contacts by category.

 

From View menu, select Current View and then By Category.

 

 

1 record is listed under Categories “Newsletter” and “Vendors”.

Now you can do a mail merge and send personalized email to every contact under color categories.  You can also add color categories to other Outlook items e.g. email, task or appointment.

If you have any further question, you can reach me at chan_a@algconsultings.com.

 
 

Andrew Chan is the owner and founder of ALG Inc.