Contact organizing: Categories or Folders

My church is using Outlook 2000. One ministry is managing a list of about
900 contacts in Outlook. Currently these contacts are assigned to multiple
Categories, like Member, Volunteer, Conference, etc. The reason why we
organized the contacts via Categories is because that way you always have
only one instance of each contact to update. When organizing contacts in
folders, you need to make copies of contacts.

The culprit is that some Outlook functions, like picking contacts from the
address book, or exporting contacts, allow to to pick a specific folder as a
source, but not a category.

Is there any way to may folders behave like categories, so that a contact
can be present in multiple folders as a "view", while physically only having
one instance of a contact?

On 28 May 2004 16:26, "awesterink" wrote:
My church is using Outlook 2000. One ministry is managing a list of
about 900 contacts in Outlook. Currently these contacts are assigned to
multiple Categories, like Member, Volunteer, Conference, etc. The
reason why we organized the contacts via Categories is because that way
you always have only one instance of each contact to update. When
organizing contacts in folders, you need to make copies of contacts.

The culprit is that some Outlook functions, like picking contacts from
the address book, or exporting contacts, allow to to pick a specific
folder as a source, but not a category.

Is there any way to may folders behave like categories, so that a
contact can be present in multiple folders as a "view", while
physically only having one instance of a contact?

No, but there may be a way to make your categories behave as you wish.
What sorts of tasks are you trying to accomplish that you can't?
Picking from an address book won't work, however you CAN select the contacts
first (by category) then select "New Message to Contact" in order to begin
an e-mail message to the members of that category. You could also use
distribution lists for that - a slightly more elegant solution actually.

When you go to export you should be able to set a filter based upon the
category.
--
-Ben-
Ben M. Schorr, MVP-OneNote
OneNote FAQ: http://home.hawaii.rr.com/schorr/Com...OneNoteFAQ.htm
SchorrTech Blog: http://www.thespoke.net/MyBlog/bschorr/MyBlog.aspx

Thanks for your reply. Yes, the message to Contact works fine when first
selecting a Category, although I then have to manually cut and paste that to
the bcc: field when sending to a large list. But fine, that's doable. It's
when you DO you use the address book when I wish I could select Categories
as well as folders. Distribution Lists are okay..but one more thing to
maintain.

I did find one workaround for e.g. creating mail merges: by creating a
custom view that only shows the category I want to do a mail merge for. The
only other thing is exporting...that seems to work for folders only. Oh
well...



Ben M. Schorr; "MVP-OneNote" wrote in message
. ..
On 28 May 2004 16:26, "awesterink" wrote:
My church is using Outlook 2000. One ministry is managing a list of
about 900 contacts in Outlook. Currently these contacts are assigned to
multiple Categories, like Member, Volunteer, Conference, etc. The
reason why we organized the contacts via Categories is because that way
you always have only one instance of each contact to update. When
organizing contacts in folders, you need to make copies of contacts.

The culprit is that some Outlook functions, like picking contacts from
the address book, or exporting contacts, allow to to pick a specific
folder as a source, but not a category.

Is there any way to may folders behave like categories, so that a
contact can be present in multiple folders as a "view", while
physically only having one instance of a contact?

No, but there may be a way to make your categories behave as you wish.
What sorts of tasks are you trying to accomplish that you can't?
Picking from an address book won't work, however you CAN select the
contacts
first (by category) then select "New Message to Contact" in order to begin
an e-mail message to the members of that category. You could also use
distribution lists for that - a slightly more elegant solution actually.

When you go to export you should be able to set a filter based upon the
category.
--
-Ben-
Ben M. Schorr, MVP-OneNote
OneNote FAQ: http://home.hawaii.rr.com/schorr/Com...OneNoteFAQ.htm
SchorrTech Blog: http://www.thespoke.net/MyBlog/bschorr/MyBlog.aspx