Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Contact Groups are a fast way to tag a group of names onto an email To: line.
Quick reference
Contact Groups
A Contact Group is one contact record that contains multiple people.
When to use
If you find yourself adding the same people to emails over and over again, create a Contact Group. Then, add that group to future emails to save time and frustration.
Instructions
To create a contact group:
- Open your contacts view by clicking the People button.
- Click New Contact Group.
- Name the Group and click “Add Members”.
- Select and double-click the names to be added to the group.
- If you need to remove someone, open the group and select Remove Member.
- If a member’s contact info has changed, you must go back into the group file and click Update Now. The groups do not auto-update.
- When the new group contact is created, right-click it for options to use it, i.e. create an email or meeting.
- When using a group contact in an email, the To: line displays like this.
- Click the plus sign “+” beside; it will open up the names to be viewable by all who receive the email.
To delete a contact group:
- Click the Contact Group card and press delete, OR
Open the Contact Group card and click Delete Group.
In a new email, click the To: line and notice the icon beside the Contact Group compared to the individual Contact files.
- 00:05 Now that we have created some contacts, let's go ahead and
- 00:08 group a set of contacts together, so I can just send an email to a group.
- 00:13 To do that, I am on My Contacts, and up above on the ribbon, we see some options,
- 00:18 New Contact, New Contact Group.
- 00:20 Well, that's exactly what I want.
- 00:21 I'll click the New Contact Group and
- 00:24 a new window shows up where we can save and close, delete it, forward it.
- 00:30 Members would be showing the members of it, which none exist yet.
- 00:33 Notes, so I can write notes in here about why I have this group.
- 00:38 And this is the key, Add Members.
- 00:40 Let's go ahead and click that one.
- 00:43 From Outlook Contacts, that's my own personal contacts list.
- 00:47 From Address Book, this would be my corporate environment,
- 00:50 everyone in the company would show up here, or I can just type a brand new one.
- 00:54 I'm going to choose From Outlook Contacts.
- 00:57 Now, you simply double-click the ones you want in the group.
- 01:00 Check out what happens down here as I double-click through these.
- 01:06 Now, I'll go ahead and click OK, and there's everyone in the group.
- 01:10 Now, keep your eye on the ribbon, a couple new buttons just popped up.
- 01:14 We have a Remove Member, in case I want to remove one of them, and the Update Now.
- 01:18 You see, as you update a contact's information, this does not auto-update.
- 01:24 You actually have to go into the group, hit Update Now,
- 01:27 it's basically a refresh button, and
- 01:29 then it'll pull in their new updated email address if that ever changes.
- 01:33 From the same ribbon, I can email these people, I can set up meetings,
- 01:37 I can categorize this.
- 01:38 I'll go ahead and add a green category to this one.
- 01:42 I can mark it for Follow-Up or mark it Private.
- 01:45 Now, read the tooltip.
- 01:46 Mark this item as private so that other people cannot see the details of it.
- 01:50 They won't be able to read the notes.
- 01:52 Then we have a zoom control.
- 01:53 Basically you can zoom in and out to make the screen larger.
- 01:57 I'm done with that, so let's do the Save & Close and
- 02:00 take a look at the new contact, our group contact.
- 02:03 My mistake, I didn't name it.
- 02:04 Let's name it first.
- 02:07 Now, Save & Close.
- 02:09 The new group is right up here at the very top because I named it A Team.
- 02:13 Now if I right-click on that group, we basically have the same options that we
- 02:18 had on the ribbon when I double-click and open it.
- 02:22 I wonder if I can click and drag and
- 02:24 drop this on the email to create a brand new email out of this group.
- 02:29 Now, I let go on top of the email button, there it is.
- 02:33 The A Team is on the To line.
- 02:35 When I click this plus sign, it's going to give me a warning,
- 02:38 that if I expand the list, Outlook will replace it with its members.
- 02:42 So if I send it right now, everyone will see A Team.
- 02:45 It doesn't matter, you choose whichever one works best for you.
- 02:48 Then go ahead and address the email, type your note, and send it.
- 02:52 So that's how we group together a bunch of contact names.
- 02:54 It's a time saver when it comes time to send an email to the entire group.
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