Office For Seniors For Dummies
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Outlook refers to the information you store about people and organizations as contact information, and stores it in a folder called Contacts. To access the Contacts folder, click the Contacts icon (which looks like two people) in the bottom-left corner of the Outlook window.

The Contacts folder shows each contact that you’ve entered into Outlook 2019.

Outlook 2019 contact folder

Although the image above shows several contacts, you don’t have any when you start out. You must enter each one individually.

To store someone’s contact information, follow these steps:
  1. From the Contacts window, click the New Contact button in the upper-left corner.

    A new Untitled – Contact window appears.

    In step 1, you can also choose Home → New Contact or press Ctrl+N to start a new contact. Check out these other Outlook 2019 keyboard shortcuts.

  2. Fill in the information you want to store for the person or organization.

    You can fill in as much or as little as you like.

    Outlook 2019 contact info

    The more complete you make an entry for a person, the more helpful Outlook can be. However, it takes more time to enter all the details required for a complete record than to just enter a name and email address. None of the fields are mandatory.

  3. Click the Save & Close button on the Ribbon. The contact is added to your Contacts list.
Here are some tips to consider when you’re entering contact information in Outlook 2019:
  • Whatever you type in the Full Name field replaces Untitled in the dialog box’s title bar immediately.
  • In the File As field, specify how this entry is alphabetized. The default is by last name, so it reverses whatever you put in the Full Name field. For example, if you enter John Doe in the Full Name field, the File As appears as Doe, John. For people’s names, this is usually the best way to go. For a company name (such as ACME Corporation), though, you probably don’t want it alphabetized as Corporation, ACME. To fix that, open the File As drop-down list and choose ACME Corporation.
  • If you enter a company name (in the Company field), even more choices are available from the File As list. For example, you can choose to alphabetize by the company name rather than the individual, and to put the individual or company name in parentheses, like these:
    • ACME Corporation (Doe, John)
    • Doe, John (ACME Corporation)
  • You can store multiple email addresses for the same person. Notice that Email isn’t just a field label, but also a drop-down list. Open the list and choose Email 2, Email 3, and so on for additional addresses.
  • All Phone Numbers fields also have drop-down lists associated with their labels. You can store four phone numbers for a person, and you can choose which labels each of those will carry. For example, you could assign the label Mobile to one of the phone numbers.
  • You can have three addresses for a person: Business, Home, and Other. Switch between them with the drop-down list in the Addresses section.
  • When you enter an address but don’t enter it in proper mailing format (address, city, state, and zip code), a dialog box will prompt you to fill those in. This is for your own protection: to make sure every address you enter is usable.
  • Use the Notes pane to store any additional information about the person that doesn’t match up with any of the fields.
  • The default fields that appear are called the General fields. There are more fields available. On the Contact tab, in the Show group, click Details to see others.
  • To customize how your Contacts appear, choose from sets of fields other than the defaults.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Faithe Wempen is an adjunct instructor at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI). She is the author of over 150 books on computer hardware and software, and an online technology courseware developer whose courses have educated over a quarter of a million people.

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