At this point you might be wondering what happens if you want to attach an Outlook email message to an ACT! contact and find that the contact doesn't yet exist in ACT!. You might be thinking that you're dead in the water—or you might have already guessed that ACT! has a solution to that dilemma. If you thought the latter, you're absolutely correct!
You'll want to make sure that your ACT! email preferences are properly configured to work with Outlook. You might also want to take a look at the Duplicate Checking preference that you had previously set up in ACT! so that you don't inadvertently add duplicate records to your ACT! database.
- Select a message from an Outlook folder.
- Click the Create ACT! contact icon on Outlook's toolbar.
- The New Contact dialog box opens with the sender's name and email address already filled in.
- Fill in any additional contact information (optional). The following figure shows you a sample New Contacts dialog box:
- Select or clear the Private checkbox (optional).
- Click OK.
You'll receive a confirmation if the contact was successfully added to your ACT! database. If you have enabled duplicate checking enabled and the contact matches an existing record in your database, a message appears telling you that the new contact was not created. However, because not all ACT! fields are available when adding the new contact you might want to find the new contact in your ACT! database and fill in the remaining fields.
At this point you might be wondering what happens if you receive an email that was addressed to several contacts, none of which exist in your ACT! database. As you've probably guessed, ACT! can handle this situation as well.
If the message contains multiple senders' names or addresses, the Select Contacts dialog window will open, listing the contacts included in the email message in the Outlook contacts pane. Use the single right-pointing arrow to move the contact to the Save to ACT! pane. The following figure shows you what the Select Contacts dialog window looks like:
ACT! has so many neat tricks up its sleeve that it's hard to keep track of them all. If you like the idea that "one piece of software does it all" then you'll undoubtedly love ACT!'s ability to schedule an appointment directly from incoming Outlook messages in one of two ways:
- If you had set your ACT! email preferences to include incoming meeting invitations, Outlook automatically adds an activity to your ACT! calendar when you accept a meeting request
- Click the Create ACT! Activity icon in the Outlook toolbar to open ACT!'s Schedule Activity dialog box and schedule a new activity with the sender of an incoming Outlook email message