Address Book shows First name first

[Tom]

I use MS Outlook and have an extensive CONTACTS list. I
display and sort the Conatacts by last name. Yet when I
click on Address Book or click on TO in a new e-mail, the
names are listed and sorted by first name. This is
extremely inconvenient and annoying. How can I set the
Address Book to show and sort by last name?

I am using Windows XP and Office XP SP2.

Thanks, Tom

 

[Roady]

You'll have to change the "File as" property for each contact for this. You
can't change the view of the addressbook. Otherwise you could use the
Contactsfolder for this; select the people you want and then goto Action->
New message to contact

Hope this helps!

 

[Tom]

All my "File as" is shown as Last name, first name in the
CONTACTS and are sorted by last name. That part is
perfect. But when I click on TO in a new e-mail, or
click on the Address Book, it comes up as First name,
Last name and is sorted by first name. There is a way to
fix this as I had it working before my hard drive crashed
last week. When I reloaded everything on a new hard
drive, I couldn't get the Address Book back to where I
had it.

I had this problem before, but about a year ago, someone
in this newsgroup gave me the answer and I can't for the
life of me remember what he said to do. It was too long
ago for the SEARCH mechanism to locate the Q & A.
Hopefully someone out there still knows the answer.

Thanks, Tom

 

[Roady]

Also found the KB-article for it; I really feel stupid now as I've changed
it millions of times when we were still running Outlook 98 :-S A bit of a
"Doh!" moment...
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=298766

We do. You don't need to change the File As... fields. All you need to do is
configure the Outlook Address Book to sort by the File As... field. Go to
Tools > E-mail accounts > View or change existing directories or address
books > Outlook Address Book > Change. > Set your sort order there
--
Russ Valentine
[MVP-Outlook]

All my "File as" is shown as Last name, first name in the
CONTACTS and are sorted by last name. That part is
perfect. But when I click on TO in a new e-mail, or
click on the Address Book, it comes up as First name,
Last name and is sorted by first name. There is a way to
fix this as I had it working before my hard drive crashed
last week. When I reloaded everything on a new hard
drive, I couldn't get the Address Book back to where I
had it.

I had this problem before, but about a year ago, someone
in this newsgroup gave me the answer and I can't for the
life of me remember what he said to do. It was too long
ago for the SEARCH mechanism to locate the Q & A.
Hopefully someone out there still knows the answer.

Thanks, Tom