Recovering Custom Forms After Additions Have Been Made To It?

I designed a custom contact form in outlook. I then proceeded to enter all
of my data. I realized that I wanted to add two choices to a drop-box that I
had created. I went to the original custom design, made the additions and
saved. Somewhere in the saving process I lost the custom design. Now when I
go to the contacts that I created, if I go to view as a phone list I can see
all of the data entered, including the custom fields that I created. If I
click on one of the contacts to view as a contact page, the custom
tabs/fields are not there and it is the regular contact page. How do I
retrieve the custom contact form? In the future how do I make changes to a
custom form without loosing information etc?

It's impossible to know where you might have put the original design, since
it's not clear whether you published the form or were creating items from an
..oft file or just saved the item. One clue would be to add the Message Class
field to the view and see whether it says IPM.Contact for all items or
something else.

FYI, there is a newsgroup specifically for Outlook forms issues "down the
hall" at microsoft.public.outlook.program_forms or, via web interface, at
http://www.microsoft.com/office/comm...rogram_f orms

Best practice is to publish the custom form to the contacts folder and
create items using the published form. For a backup, save the form as an
..oft file.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of
Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers
http://www.outlookcode.com/jumpstart.aspx


"Elizabeth" wrote in message
...
I designed a custom contact form in outlook. I then proceeded to enter
all
of my data. I realized that I wanted to add two choices to a drop-box
that I
had created. I went to the original custom design, made the additions and
saved. Somewhere in the saving process I lost the custom design. Now
when I
go to the contacts that I created, if I go to view as a phone list I can
see
all of the data entered, including the custom fields that I created. If I
click on one of the contacts to view as a contact page, the custom
tabs/fields are not there and it is the regular contact page. How do I
retrieve the custom contact form? In the future how do I make changes to
a
custom form without loosing information etc?