Adding Contacts to the Address Book

Outlook provides you with several ways to add information to an address book.

Adding a contact manually

• To add a new contact to the address book:

• If Contacts are active in Outlook, click the New button on the toolbar or press Ctrl+N. If Contacts are not active in Outlook, click the arrow next to the New button on the toolbar and select Contact from the menu.

In either case, Outlook displays a new, blank contact form, as shown in Figure 29-8. Type in the information—only a name is required, and you can use or not use the other fields as you desire—and then click Save and Close on the Ribbon. If you want to save this contact and enter another, click Save and New. Most of the fields on the contact form are self-explanatory, but I provide full details about the form later in this chapter.

Adding a contact from a received e-mail

When you have opened a received e-mail, the From field displays the name or the e-mail address (or both) of the sender. It also displays any other recipients—other than you, that is—in the To and Cc fields. You can add the From person or any of the other To or Cc people to your Contacts list by right-clicking it and choosing Add to Outlook Contacts from the context menu. Outlook opens a new contact form with the available information filled in. This information includes only the person’s e-mail address and perhaps name. You can add additional information to the contact form, if desired, and then click Save and Close.

Adding a contact from an Outlook contact

The heading of this section may seem confusing but it makes more sense when you understand that an Outlook user can send a contact as an attachment to an e-mail message. The technique for doing this is covered later in this chapter, in the section “Sending contact information by e-mail.”

If you receive a contact in an e-mail message, it appears as an attachment identified by a small business card icon and the contact’s name, as shown in Figure 29-9. If you double-click the attachment, Outlook opens a new contact form with the contact’s information entered. You can edit the information if needed and then save it to your address book.

Adding a contact from a vCard file

A vCard file is a special file format designed to send contact information. Although this is not Outlook’s native format for sending and receiving contact information, Outlook can read vCard files that you may receive from people using other e-mail software. vCard files work the same way as Outlook contacts that were described in the previous section: You double-click the attachment to add the information to your address book. Outlook users can also send vCards to other people, which is explained later in the chapter in the section “Sending contact information by e-mail.”