How to Manage Outlook Categories
Although we want to keep in touch with everybody in our database, the task can become daunting if we don’t have a plan for addressing our ideal clients with just the right goods or services. Categories exist to help us structure our contacts into either common and/or exacting groups, allowing a “divide and conquer” approach to managing our data.
You probably already know that multiple categories can apply to a single contact. For example, if I know Sally Westwood is in 3 networking groups, I can apply 3 categories to her: WRS, NEW and Chamber: WRS because she is a member of Worthwhile Referral Sources, NEW because she is a member of Network for Empowering Women, and Chamber because she is a member of the local Chamber of Commerce.
So, when I click on the Contacts Folder and sort contacts By Category (from the Advanced toolbar Current View dropdown) I will see her in 3 groups. Note that there are NOT 3 occurrences of her record, just 3 appearances, one in each of the 3 categories. There are only rare instances when you want to create more than one record per person as any change in one would demand a change in any others.
Categories are NOT case sensitive. In the above example, I could use new or NEW or New and Outlook would use all interchangeably. Categories, however, are indeed text sensitive and herein belies danger.
For example, if I were to create a News category for sending people an up-to-the-minute newsletter on what’s new in Contact Management, I could create a View of those people in this category, but I will see additionally those NEW members, because Outlook was seeking the text “NEW” and found it within “news”. Whoa! This can definitely catch you off guard and cause some serious head-scratching, especially if you use short category names that are included in a another category
You may instead consider using N.E.W. (with the periods denoting this as an acronym) to help segregate the two types. Another idea is to use longer category names that don’t overlap such as NewEmpWomen and Newsletter. What I don’t like about this approach is whenever the category field is displayed the category names become obstructed from view when there are too many. The best approach is to use short abbreviations that are not likely to be in any other category.
Now once you have decided on your categories (which you can change, add, delete at any time by the way) you might be saying “well that’s all fine and good Mr. Magician, but how do I change all 1,000 existing NEW contacts in my base without bringing up each one and changing them individually?”
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Copyright 2009 Paul Wagner
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Paul Wagner is creator The Software Magician, a Training/Consulting company specializing in assisting Entrepreneurs, small businesses and large companies in software training both online and on location in your conference room. Discover more at www.softwaremagician.com.