Tips for Managing Contacts

For all of us it is important to have list of contacts (friends, relatives, colleagues) with their address, phone numbers and e-mails up-to-date and easy to access and manage.

Import/Export from Outlook to Yahoo Address Book:

I first started with Outlook Contacts Management. When I had to switch machines I exported information from local folder and re-imported them back into current machine. Later I had the need to be able to access the contact information from anywhere. So I switched to Yahoo Address Book. I used import feature in Yahoo Address book to import all data from Outlook. Then onwards I started using Address book from Yahoo to store latest contact information.

Whenever I get an updated e-mail address/mail address/phone numbers I go and edit information in Yahoo Address book.

Quick Builder

Last week I found this good feature in Yahoo Address Book. Quick Builder is the tool provided by yahoo which allows to build your address very easily. You can scan your list of e-mails to automatically add contact information to Address Book.

Print Address Book

I will also recommend printing address book from time to time to keep the address handy when you are not online. I also assign categories for each contact information as B.Tech Friend, Relatives, M. Tech Friend etc.

Around 1 year back when I had all the contact information in Yahoo, I wanted to print a set of addresses by category. Then Yahoo did not have any such feature to print address by category. I even raised a feature request to Yahoo, requesting such option. Last week when I checked there was an option to print list of address by Category. So you can use this feature to print address by category for easy filing and access.

View Map

Once you have your contacts in Yahoo Address Book, there is an additional advantage I get. When I want map, I click on the person's name and Click View Map feature to get map very easily.

Even Outlook provides this feature. You can Open a contact in Outlook and Click on Map (there is an icon in Outlook - View Map for this address) that will directly display map.

However this option is useful only for residents in US and Canada where Map feature is very important.

If you have any other tips on this, do post your tips.

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