Creating and Using Outlook 2010 Contact Groups

Do you frequently send mail to the same group of people? Are you tired of poking through your Contacts to select everyone you need to send to? Then you probably ought to learn about Outlook 2010 Contact Groups.

Contact Groups, as the name implies, are a way to group together a bunch of Contacts so you can more easily send them messages. This is very much like an email distribution list or mailing list, but with a few differences.

As the figure below shows, a Contact Group looks very much like a regular Contact, but can be identified by the word Group which appears under the name of the group.

Creating Contact Groups

Creating a Contact Group is a pretty straightforward process. Here’s how it is done:

1. Switch Outlook 2010 to Contacts view.
2. In the “Home” tab of the Ribbon, click New Contact Group. This opens the “Contact Group” dialog box.

3. On the “Contact Group” tab of the dialog box’s Ribbon, click Add Members, which is located in the “Members” group.
4. In the menu that appears, click the method you want to use to add members to the Contact Group. For this example, click From Outlook Contacts. This opens the “Select Members Contacts” dialog box.


Note: In the interest of privacy, I erased all but two of the Contacts in this figure. Abraham Adamson, the Contact that is selected, is an individual. Adamson Clan, is a Contact Group. You can tell the difference by the way Adamson Clan is bolded, and its icon shows two people instead of one.

5. Select the Contacts you want to add to the group, using the SHIFT and CTRL keys to select multiple Contacts at once, then click Members to add those Contacts to the group.
6. Click OK to return to the “Contacts Group” dialog box.
7. Enter a name for the Contact Group in the “Name” field, then click Save & Close. This brings you back to the Contacts view, withthe new group appearing at its appropriate location in the view.

Using Contact Groups

When you want to send a message, you can use a Contact Group just like you would a regular Contact. However, there is one thing to be aware of. When you enter a Contact Group into a message’s address field (“To,” “From,” etc.), Outlook doesn’t show just the name of the Contact Group.

Instead, it enters the information for each of the Contacts that is part of the group. So if you enter the name of a Contact Group containing 6 members in the “To” field, Outlook wil display all six members there.

This means that every recipient of the message will see the contact information for every other recipient. If this isn’t what you want, you should enter the Contact Group name into the “BCC” field, which hides the information from the recipients.

From here you can:

• Return to the top of this Contact Groups page.
• Return to the Contacts home page.
• Go to the Living With Outlook 2010 home page.

Get Your Gmail Contacts Into Outlook 2010: Here’s How

If you want to make the Gmail Outlook 2010 connection, and be able to work with your Gmail account in Outlook 2010 as well as using your web browser, you need to do two things. The first is, of course, to set up the Gmail Outlook connection for your email.

That’ll let you read and write Gmail messages in Outlook, and free you from having to constantly check your email in two different places. There’s a link at the bottom of this page that takes you to the instructions for setting up a Gmail IMAP connection to Outlook which synchronizes messages between the two and works great.

The second step is to make sure that Outlook has a copy of all your Gmail Contacts, so you can easily get in touch with all the people you typically contact through Gmail. Getting your Gmail Contacts into Outlook is what we’re going to talk about here.

Note: If you are trying to get your Gmail Contacts into Outlook 2007 instead of Outlook 2010, then you should CLICK HERE.

Before we go any further, understand that what we will be doing is making a copy of your Gmail contacts and transferring that copy into Outlook 2010. There won’t be any continuing back-and-forth synchronization between your Gmail Contacts and you Outlook Contacts like you get with the Gmail Outlook connection linked at the bottom of this page.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a similar solution for contacts. That means if you add new contacts using the Gmail web interface instead of Outlook 2010, you’ll need to run this process again to get the new Gmail Contacts into Outlook. And if you add contacts on the Outlook side, they won’t show up on the Gmail side.

Copy Your Gmail Contacts to Outlook Contacts

It’s easy to get a copy of your Gmail contacts into Outlook. There are a lot of steps but nothing too complicated. Just follow these steps:

1. Log into your Gmail account and click the Contacts tab. This displays your Gmail Contacts list.
2. at the bottom center of the box containing your Contacts, click the More Actions button. This opens the menu shown below.





3. Click Export. This opens the “Export Contacts” dialog box.





4. Select “All contacts” and “Outlook CSV format,” then click Export. Depending on your browser, Gmail will either display a “Save As” dialog box, or automatically save the Gmail Contacts file, with a file name of “google.csv” or “contacts.csv” to your browser’s default download directory. If you get to choose the file name and location, be sure not to change the extension (.csv) and to record the filename you use and where you save it.
5. In Outlook 2010, click the File tab in the Ribbon, then the Open button.
6. Click Import. The “Import and Export” Wizard appears.





7. Select “Import from another program or file,” then click Next
8. Select “Comma Separated Values (DOS)” and click Next. This opens an “Import a File” screen.





9. Click Browse, and navigate to the location you recorded earlier. You should see the filename you recorded, probably without the “.csv” part.
10. Select the file name and click OK. This displays the “Import a File” screen.





11. Select the “Do not import duplicate items” option, and click Next. This opens a screen that allows you to specify where you want to put the imported contacts.





12. Navigate through the folder until you see the Contacts folder. Select the Contacts folder to tell Outlook to import all the contacts into this folder, and click Next.
13. In the screen that appears, Outlook tells you exactly what it will be doing, which is importing contacts from the file into your Contacts folder. Click Finish and allow Outlook to do its work.

It may take a few minutes for Outlook to process your contacts. While it is working, you will see a box on your screen that shows you how the work is progressing.

Once that box disappears, the work is done and your Gmail Contacts have been copied to Outlook.

From here you can:

Return to the top of this Gmail Contacts to Outlook 2010 page.

Go to the Outlook 2010 Contacts home page.

Go to the main Gmail Outlook configuration page.

Go to the Living With Outlook 2010 home page.

Hotmail Contacts in Outlook 2010

You can use the Outlook Hotmail Connector to synchronize your Hotmail Folders and Outlook 2010, allowing you to manage all your Hotmail messages from within Outlook. The next logical step would be to have access to all of your Hotmail Contacts in Outlook 2010…and of course you can. Here’s how it works.

The Appearance of Hotmail Contacts in Outlook 2010

I have to admit, when I first set up the Outlook Hotmail Connector, I thought that the Contacts synchronization wasn’t working. I didn’t see my Hotmail Contacts in Outlook 2010 anywhere. Well, it turned out that the problem was with my cluttered “My Contacts” section and my bad eyes. Take a look at the figure below:

If you look carefully you will see that there are two Contacts folders named “Contacts.” After those names you can see the email addresses those contacts folders belong to, but note how the fonts used tend to blend in to the background. That’s what threw me.

At first I didn’t notice the “@hotmail.com” address, and was looking for something more obvious, similar to the way that Hotmail message folders appear in their own section of the Navigation Pane. Anyway…

Your Hotmail Contacts show up in their won folder under “My Contacts.” Open that folder and you can treat it just like any other Outlook Contacts folder. You can use the different views, move things around, edit your Contacts, whatever you need to do.

When you work with this folder, any relevant changes automatically get synchronized back into your Hotmail account. It is an ideal way to manage and use your Hotmail Contacts.

Would you like to:

• Go back to the top of this Hotmail Contacts in Outlook 2010 page
• Learn how to install the Outlook Hotmail Connector page
• Go to the main Outlook 2010 Contacts page
• Go to the Living With Outlook 2010 Home page

How to Import Yahoo Contacts

If you want to use Outlook 2010 as your main email program, there are two things you really should do. First of course is to set up a Yahoo Outlook 2010 connection so Outlook can read and reply to mail sent to your Yahoo account. There’s a link that shows you exactly how to do this at the end of the article.

The second step is to make sure that Outlook has a copy of all your Yahoo Contacts. Getting your Yahoo Contacts into Outlook is what we’re going to talk about here.

Please be aware that what we’re going to do is make a copy of your Yahoo contacts and transfer that copy into Outlook. There won’t be any kind of live connection between the two. If after you complete this, you add new contacts into Yahoo, those contacts won’t appear in Outlook, unless you do this process again.

Note: If you want to get your Yahoo Contacts into Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007, you need to head over to this Yahoo Outlook Contacts page.

Copy Your Yahoo Contacts to Outlook Contacts

It’s easy to get a copy of your Yahoo Mail contacts into Outlook. There are a lot of steps but nothing too complicated. Just follow these steps:

1. Log into your Yahoo Mail account and click the Contacts tab to see your Yahoo Contacts.
2. Set the checkmark next to the contacts you want to copy to Outlook. Don’t worry about whether or not a contact is already included in Outlook. Later on in these instructions we’ll direct Outlook to ignore duplicate contacts.
3. Click the Tools button, then Export. You should now see an “Export: page.





4. Click the Export Now button next to the words, “Microsoft Outlook.”
5. You should now see a dialog box on the screen that says you are “Opening yahoo_ab.csv” or something similar. The exact details of the box will depend on your web browser, but the important thing is to record the file name (in this case yahoo_ab.csv).





6. Next, you want to tell your web browser to save this file. Keep track of where it is saved if your browser displays that information. If not, have Windows search your computer for the file name you recorded in the previous step. Record the location where the file was saved.
7. In Outlook, click the File tab in the Ribbon, then the Open menu option.
8. Click Import. The Import and Export Wizard appears.
9. Select “Import from another program or file,” then click Next
10. Select “Comma Separated Values (Windows)” and click Next.
11. The Import a File dialog box appears. Click Browse, and navigate to the location you recorded earlier. You should see the filename you recorded, probably without the “.csv” part.
12. Select the file name and click OK. This displays the Import a File screen.





13. Select the “Do not import duplicate items” option, and click Next.
14. The next screen that appears shows you all the folders in Outlook. Navigate through this until you see the Contacts folder. Select the Contacts folder to tell Outlook to import all the contacts into this folder, and click Next.





15. In the screen that appears, Outlook tells you exactly what it will be doing, which is importing contacts from the file into your Contacts folder. Click Finish and allow Outlook to do its work.

It may take a few minutes for Outlook to process your Yahoo contacts. While it is working, you will see a box on your screen that shows you how the work is progressing. Once that box disappears, the work is done and your Yahoo Contacts have been copied to Outlook.

P.S. Don’t forget to repeat this process when your Yahoo Contacts change, or the changes won’t make it into Outlook.

To learn how to get your Yahoo Mail in Outlook 2010, visit this Yahoo in Outlook 2010 page.

To learn more about Outlook 2010 Contacts, visit this Outlook 2010 Contacts page.

You can also…

Go to the Living With Outlook 2010 home page.

Or return to the top of this “Import your Yahoo Contacts into Outlook” page.