Last week, we did Contact management 101. I hope you see the value in having all your contacts in one place. This week, we can chat about work contacts and Categories, and how to use them. Next week, we can chat about all things with personal contacts – how to store them, how to move a contact from one database to another on your phone.

Let’s start with Categories. Outlook has a feature in the Contacts section called “Categories”. This feature allows you to group like contacts with each other. For example, in your Contact database, you may have sales reps, members, club employees, other club professionals, and industry professionals. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could ONLY view your sales reps when you wanted to? Imagine if you didn’t have to hunt for each rep through the rest of your 1000 contacts. With Categories, you can do this. A contact can be a “member” of multiple categories.

Say you have my contact in your Outlook Contacts file. I could be under Sales Reps, Callaway, Personal, and Industry Professionals. You could have a member under Club Members, Wed Night Men’s league, Tue Morning Ladies League, Personal – professional. You could have your Assistant Professionals under Club Employees – Golf Shop Staff and Club Employees – Golf Operations. You get the picture. Why look for 3 people in a database of 1000 when you can organize them and then find what you need in one click?

I have 27 Categories. I group my golf courses by region. Staff players are also in a Category, Industry Professionals. You get it.

HOW do you add a contact to a Category? Select a contact. Right click. You’ll see Categorize. Select that. At first, you’ll see your most frequently used categories (you may have none). Select the Category you want to put the contact in. You can also select multiple contacts to move all at once, or you can drag and drop if you view by Categories (you should do this). If you don’t have any Categories set up, Right Click on a contact, Categorize, All Categories, NEW –> create then save. Repeat for all your categories.

Ready to View by Categories? Once you have your contacts stored in categories, you want to view them by Category. Show off your work, right?? Go to the View menu, on the left side of the ribbon, go to View Settings. In the window that opens, select Group By…, and select Categories (ascending). Hit OK. Now when you open your Contacts, you can see all your Categories. Click the little arrow to open the group. There is just the contacts that fall into that group. Nice, eh??

Ready to take this to the next level? I don’t hate much more that an email distribution list that has each contact spelled out in the To: line. I have to scroll through 200 email addresses to get to your message? Uh, no. Delete. First, use BCC. Second, create a “Contact Group” . Simply add members and give the list a name. You can send a mass email to your Wednesday night men’s league in 14 seconds.

Your work, your way.

Happy Professionalism. Enjoy your work/ life balance.