If you do work with multiple folders, using the People view, available in Outlook 2013 and Outlook 2016, might help with aggregating and displaying all the contact information within a singe contact contact. Outlook 2010 also has an additional Suggested Contacts folder and you may still have some Contacts folders from (discontinued) Outlook Social Connector Providers such as LinkedIn. Sometimes, you have no choice but to go for this approach when you have multiple accounts configured since each Exchange and mailbox come with their own Contacts folder. For instance, you can place your less frequently used contacts or “old” contacts in a separate Contacts folder to prevent them from synching to your smartphone or tablet.Īnother situation is when you want to share only a limited amount of contacts. Of course, there are situations where you can use these limitations to your advantage as well. You’d then have the risk of updating only 1 copy of that contact with the latest contact information and forget which copy that was which results in conflicting information or confusion afterwards. When you split your contacts between multiple folders, you could end up creating the contact in multiple folders as well.

Less chance of duplicates or conflicting information.Most mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) or sync software only support synching with the main or a single Outlook Contacts folder. Selecting an address by clicking on the To… button can only display a single list at once though and changing between multiple lists or folders can be inconvenient and cumbersome to locate a contact. I try to stay away from using multiple Contacts folders for several reasons:īy default, only the main Contacts folder is added to your Outlook Address Book although you can add additional ones. Multiple Contacts FoldersĬreating multiple Contacts folders is the most direct way to split your contacts but it is also the least flexible. Especially when you have lots of contacts. It really depends on which method you like best and how you work with your contacts.Īs the methods aren’t mutually exclusive, using a combination of the methods could improve your efficiency as well. Which approach is the best or which one would you recommend?Īll the methods that you mention are viable options. There seem to be various options such as creating additional Contacts (sub) folders, creating Contact Groups and using Categories. I’m trying to sort my Contacts a bit more effectively but I’m a bit at a loss to determine what the best approach is.

Contact list outlook 2016