Dave
Thu Apr 27 09:54:54 CDT 2006
The key to this is that in your Outlook contacts folder, you have to use
Categories in the contacts. For example, if you make sure that each bank is
in the BANKS category, you'll be in business. It becomes a little more
difficult if you use BANKS and I use BANK. But other than that, this is a
very simple process, IMO much simpler than learning, deploying, and
migrating your contact info to Access. In fact, using my method, you could
easily export your contacts (some or all) to Access or Excel any time you
wish.
Let's say you have a public or personal Contacts folder where every contact
is assigned the appropriate category. Open that folder in Outlook and click
View -> Arrange by -> Show views in navigation pane. In the navigation
pane, click the view called "By Category." You'll see that this sorts all
your BANKS together, etc. You can expand or collapse the categories to show
the contacts beneath.
You now have several options you can experiment with. If you select the
category heading (the grey bar that says Categories: Banks) you can click
Actions -> New Message to Contact. That will send an e-mail to every e-mail
address in the selected category (yes, those with 2 addresses will get the
message at each). Bonus hint: Go to
http://www.mapilab.com/ and get the
Outlook add-in called Send Personally. It'll let you automatically send
individual messages to each contact rather than one message to all.
Although you unfortunately can't do it from the category heading bar, you
can select all the contacts in a given category and choose Tools -> Mail
Merge to merge to Word for a paper mailing. Depending on how often you do
this, you can make it a little more elegant by going to View -> Arrange
by -> Current View -> Define Views. Select the view you prefer to use and
click Copy. Name the new view Banks Only (or whatever). Click the Filter
button and on the More Choices tab, choose only the BANKS category. Now,
when you select that view, you'll obviously see only contacts for banks.
While in that view, click Tools -> Mail Merge and choose to send only to
contacts in the current view.
There are probably some slick ways to export only certain contacts to a CSV
file for use in Excel or Access. What I do is to export the whole folder
and do the filtering, sorting or whatever in Excel. It's so simple to do
the export that I just do a new one any time I need it. That way, I always
have current information without trying to keep my Excel workbook in sync
with my contacts folders.
"Ian Sime" <iansime@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:e2q61u$qhr$1$8300dec7@news.demon.co.uk...
>I have n SBS 2000 box that is soon to be migrated to a new server with SBS
>2003.
>
> We currently have a number of Public Folders that are accessible by all
> staff. Many of them are used primarily for mailshot purposes (paper mail
> as well as e-mail), but it is useful for all staff to be able to access
> them via Outlook.
>
> The problem this gives us is when we are running a mailshot, we might
> sometimes want to include some lists of contacts, but exclude others (e.g.
> select all BANKS and SOLICITORS).
>
> It has been suggested that we move all of the contacts into an Access
> database that we would have to build. This would give us the flexibility
> of being able to perform queries on the lists, but would mean that only
> people who had Access installed would be able to read the information -
> and even then it wouldn't be as intuitive as it currently is via Outlook.
> We could use Access as well as Outlook, but that would mean updating the
> same information in 2 places whenever something changes.
>
> So, does anybody know of a better way of doing what I am planning with
> Access, or better still a completely different way to achieve the same
> goal.
> Don't assume I haven't missed something obvious either !
>
>
> Ian.
>