Update general info for multiple contacts

Creating contacts is easy and before you know it you’ve got several dozen, hundreds of them in your Contacts folder. It is very likely that some of them have relations with one another like the same company. If you want to store company info with the contacts you just don’t want to open every contact and add the same information to it. Even worse; do you want to change the address for every contact when the company relocates? I know I wouldn’t!

The following method describes an easy way to update general information for contacts that are linked with one another in some way.

To start we simply update the information for one contact (in this case the Business Address) and then Save and Close that contact. Then we modify the view of the Contacts folder so that the all the contacts are grouped by that updated field. So for our example of the Business Address that would be;

1. View-> Arrange By-> Custom…*
2. In the Customize View window press Group By…
3. At the bottom set the “Select available fields from:” to “Address fields”
4. At the top you can now set the “Group items by” to “Business Address” field
   
5. OK your way out of the open dialog boxes

*Instead of modifying the view you can also define a special Business Address view. Step one then gets replaced by

1. View-> Arrange By-> Current View-> Define Views…-> New
2. Name it Business Address -> OK

Now you’ll see that all your contacts are grouped by the Business Address. Select the contacts who still have the old address and drag & drop them into the group of your updated contact. Outlook will automatically update the Business Address field for all those contacts.