A Close-Up of Outlook’s Contact-Management Features
If you have Microsoft Office 2000, chances are you’re one of the millions of people who also have a copy of Microsoft Outlook 2000. That’s the combination e-mail and personal information program that comes with Office. You can also buy it separately for about $100, but chances are you don’t have to.
What I like most about Outlook is that it integrates e-mail with your contact information and your calendar. What I don’t like about it is that it can be a bit complicated to use. This column won’t serve as a tutorial for all of Outlook’s many features, but it might help demystify this powerful program by giving you a sense of how it can help you run your business.
Outlook is not a full substitute for a contact management program such as Act or Goldmine. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles for scheduling follow-up calls, recording sales leads and tracking relationships with your prospects and customers. Yet it does have some powerful features that you may not be aware of.
For one thing, you can manage “activities” related to any of your contacts. In the contact portion of the program, where you keep names, phone numbers, street and e-mail addresses, you can link activities from other Outlook modules directly to a contact. Let’s say, for example, that you use the Calendar function to make an appointment with someone who is in your contact list. At the bottom of the appointment screen is a space for “contacts.” You either type in that person’s name or select it from a list and the appointment is now linked to that person. Later, you can locate the person in your contact list and see a list of all past and upcoming appointments. This not only tells you what you have pending with that person, but also gives you a record of past meetings or phone conversations.
You can also link e-mails to specific people on your list, so instead of having to search through your entire “inbox” to find a message from a person, you can locate the e-mail from the person’s listing in your contact list.
Another very useful but often overlooked organizational tool is the ability to categorize contacts, appointments and e-mail. Just to the right of the contacts button in each module is a Categories button. Click on it and you can quickly place a check mark for such categories as business, competition, status, hot contacts, key customer, ideas and others. You can also add your own categories, such as the name of a project you’re working on, so that you can easily find each person, e-mail and appointment that is related to the project.
Outlook gives you the ability to sort your contacts and e-mails in ways that may make more sense than what Microsoft offers as a default. I typically sort e-mail by the time and date it was received (most recent on top), but there are times when I want to see all my messages from a single person. At the top of each column there will be a word such as “From,” “Subject,” “Received” and so on. If you click on that word once it will sort your entire list in alphabetical (or time received) order. If you click it again it will re-sort it in the other direction (Z to A) or oldest first.
Outlook has default folders where e-mail is automatically stored, but you can create your own folders and move or copy messages between them. Before a major trade show, I get a lot of messages from companies who want me to visit their booths. Rather than try to keep track of them separately, I create a special folder for the show where I keep all the related messages. Right before the show, I read them all and afterward I delete the entire folder. You can create a folder by clicking File in Outlook’s main menu and selecting “New” and then “Folder.”
Another set of powerful, though sometimes hard to use, features can be found by clicking on the Organize button near the top of Outlook’s screen when you’re in the Inbox. That set of features lets you mark or rearrange your incoming mail automatically as it arrives. For me, one of the most useful features is the “using colors” option. I get hundreds of messages a day and it’s easy for important messages to be lost in the clutter. To help solve this problem I have Outlook use colors to highlight messages from people I can’t afford to ignore. My editors and others whose good graces help keep food on my family’s table all show up in red. Personal friends whom I don’t want to offend show up in blue. Key industry contacts show up in fuchsia.
The “organize” area of Outlook also lets you automatically move or copy messages to a new or different folder based on virtually any criteria, including the subject line, the name of the person or the person’s e-mail address. You could, for example, copy any e-mail address that includes “myemployer.com” into a special folder. These same tools can also be used to copy messages from known “spammers” or anyone you don’t want to hear from into a junk folder.
There are plenty of other organizational tools available in Outlook. If you’re looking for more structure in your life, I suggest you explore the various menu options or open up Outlook’s Help function and explore its topics such as “Managing and Prioritizing Information,” “Organizing the Inbox,” and “Managing Your Contacts.”
* Technology reports by Lawrence J. Magid can be heard at 2:10 p.m. weekdays on the KNX (1070) Technology Hour. He can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web site is at https://www.larrysworld.com.
