Outlook Express

Address Book

Contents

  1. What is the address book?

  2. How do I open the address book?

  3. How do I create a contact?

  4. How do I create a group?

  5. How do I send a message to someone in the book?

  6. What else can I do with this thing?

What is the Address Book?

The address book in Outlook Express can store contact information for you. It can store not only e-mail addresses, but also phone numbers, addresses, NetMeeting info, and other information. You can create groups of people to which you can then send e-mail to as a group.

How do I open the address book?

Assuming you have Outlook Express open, click the Adress Book button (or click Address Book under the Tools Menu, or hit CTRL-SHIFT-B).

How do I create a contact?

Once you have the address book open, click the "New Contact" button. Enter the contact information in the dialog which will appear (shown on the left). Note that there are six separate tabs at the top of the dialog. Each corresponds to a separate page of information. The essential fields to fill out are the name and the e-mail address. Type the e-mail address in the field labelled E-mail Addresses .. Add new. Then click the "Add" button on the right. Finally, click OK when done.

The contact will now appear in the address book as shown on the left if you've done everything right.

NOTE: A really easy way to add a contact to your address book! Just right click an address in a message in Outlook Express. Select "Add to Address Book." The contact will be added automatically.

How do I create a group?

Once you have the address book open, click the "New Group" button. Enter the name by which you'd like to refer to the group in the "Group Name" field. Click the "New Contact" button to add a new contact, as above, or click the "Select Members" button to add members to the group who are already in your address book. The select group members dialog shown on the left appears. Click a name of a person you'd like to add to the group, then click the "Select" button. To add more than one person at a time, hold down the CTRL key while clicking names from the list. Press OK at the bottom when you're finished. Click OK again to accept the new group you've created.

The contact will now appear in the address book as shown on the left if you've done everything right.

How do I send mail to someone in the address book?

The easiest and fastest way to send mail to someone in your address book is to simply type the name of the person into the "To:" field when you are composing a new message. Note that Outlook Express will automatically complete the name for you as you type it. Once the proper name is showing up in the "To:" field, you can hit "Tab" to skip down to the next field. If you want to send the mail to more than one person, you can hit "End" or the right arrow key to go to the end of the name, type a comma and repeat the process. In the example on the right, I only had to type "dan" in order to get the whole name.

Alternatively, you can click the select recipients button, which will bring up the address book...

Now click on a name from the list in the box on the left. Click the "To:" button to add the name to the list of recipients. Similarly, click "Cc:" to add to the list of carbon-copy recipients, and "Bcc:" to add to the list of blind carbon copy recipients. Click "OK" when finished.

Now type your message as usual and send it off!

6. Other Nifty Stuff

You can type in a whole lot more than your contacts' names and e-mail addresses. You can type in their phone numbers, fax numbers, Microsoft NetMeeting information, street addresses, home page addresses, and a whole lot more. The address book functions like a real address book. There's even a page for storing "Other Information" where you can type in anything you like.

If you want to quickly view someone's information, just leave your mouse cursor on the contact's name in the address book. The info will pop up as shown on the right.
The "Find" feature is a neat part of the address book, particularly if you have a lot of contacts in it. To open up the find window click the "Find" button located on the button bar of the address book (shown on the right). You can locate people in your address book by a number of properties. You can type in any portion of the contacts name, for example, and the address book will pop up any matching entries (shown bottom right).