The Personal Address Book has been obsolete in Outlook for quite some time.
It is actually a view of your contacts folder and has no separate existence.
--
Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]
Post all replies to the group to keep the discussion intact. Due to
the (insert latest virus name here) virus, all mail sent to my personal
account will be deleted without reading.
After furious head scratching, Bill Molony asked:
| Hi Bob,
|
| Oh, if you are using Outlook, I bet you do use it far more than you
| think. The Address Book is so intimately tied into Outlook that you
| usually don't even know they are two separate apps. For example, you
| are probably using it almost every time you send an Email.
|
| When you type in just a name into TO:, CC:, or BCC: fields, in the
| background, Outlook looks up the name in the external Address Book
| list to complete the actual email address. When the email address
| changes to an underlined format, that is when it found the address in
| your Address Book--not in Outlook.
|
| That even happens when you type in the email address directly--it
| still looks it up or adds it to your Address Book. You would think
| that info comes from your Contacts but it doesn't.
|
| When you right click on the above fields in your email, the
| information you are viewing about that address also comes from the
| Address Book rather than from the Outlook Contacts.
|
| Even when you use the "Find a Contact" quick find box on the Tool Bar
| (as opposed to the Advanced Find), the place it is looking is again
| in the Address Book rather than in Contacts.
|
| And this is really only the tip of the iceburg. What is really
| amazing is that these features work together at all considering the
| problems the Address Book app has. But quite the contrary, each of
| these lookups mentioned above for the most part work extremely well
| and very quickly and relatively seamlessly.
|
| I think the primary reasoning Microsoft programmers chose this
| behavior is that the Address Book app is smaller and faster so it
| actually saves the user some time. But I would prefer that it went
| directly to the same source all the time--Outlook Contacts--even
| though that might take a little longer.
|
| It is just too much redundancy to keep two separate databases and then
| attempt to keep the two lists coordinated in the background. It does
| amaze me at times that the two lists are indeed kept almost perfectly
| coordinated. But yet, "almost" is not quite the same as "always" is
| it?
|
| That's where the problems arise. Suddenly some strange things appear
| when you change a record in Contacts but the old info still keeps
| popping up where the change did not get properly moved over to the
| Address Book. And then you find the difference (in the Address Book)
| and find that it is almost impossible to make the same change in the
| Address Book because you don't have the same tools or methods to work
| with.
|
| One of the most obvious examples of the difference between the two
| apps (though the user might not even notice) is the subtle diffecence
| between "File As" (in Outlook) vs. "Display As" (in the Address
| Book). You would think these should be the same info since they
| really should mean the same thing. But they aren't. And they don't
| even work the same way even though they should. Changing one or the
| other should automatically carry over to the other but it doesn't.
| And the logic used in building these auto fields is very flawed.
|
| But I guess my biggest problem (in a long list) with the Address Book
| is not those things mentioned above which it does generally very well
| but rather with how little the user can do to control what it does
| when somethig goes wrong. The Address Book user interface is
| extremely limited and just does not allow for much user control.
|
| So I just hope Microsoft will do something to rework this extremely
| important little app so that it can really be what it needs to be.
| Either that or completely cut its integration into Outlook and let
| Outlook do all the work itself so that there is more consistency and
| less redundancy.
|
| Sorry this turned into such a long diatribe.
I really like Outlook
| a lot and I didn't mean to get so involved. But at least I got a
| chance to "get it off my back". Thanks for "listening" and being
| interested!
|
| Be well,
| Bill
|
| "Bob I" wrote:
|
|| Sorry about the issues you are having, I guess I don't "use it very
|| hard" so I haven't got any beef with it, hence my suggestion to you.
||
|| Bill Molony wrote:
||
||| Hi Bob,
|||
||| I wish I could!
But the problems are FAR too numerous for me to
||| begin to mention them all. It would take many pages!
|||
||| The separate address book idea is great but the implementation
||| Microsoft used is extremely poorly planned and has been from the
||| very beginning. There is just not enough really intelligent thought
||| gone into it yet. And the integration with it into Outlook (as
||| opposed to Outlook Express) is particularly poor.
|||
||| I know that one of the reasons they keep putting it off is because
||| converting the trash from the old files into a new replacement
||| Address Book application is going to be a terrible can of worms.
|||
||| I was simply "venting" in hopes that it would encourage others to
||| complain to Microsoft about it as well. It is going to be tough but
||| they need to bite the bullet and make the changes needed.
|||
||| Be well,
||| Bill
|||
||| "Bob I" wrote:
|||
|||
|||| Hello Bill, this is a user to user forum. Perhaps you could
|||| identify
|||| those "LOTS of problems" and post them to an appropriate location.
|||| Such as:
http://register.microsoft.com/mswish/suggestion.asp
|||| or
|||| (e-mail address removed)
||||
|||| Bill Molony wrote:
||||
||||
||||| I realize that the Address Book feature is used and integrated
||||| into multiple Office applications and as such must be rather
||||| flexible to meet each set ot needs. But the Address Book has LOTS
||||| of problems about it that should have been fixed several versions
||||| back. Somehow those fixes seem to stay on the "back burner". I
||||| sincerely hope that Microsoft will see fit to rework the Address
||||| Book application substantially in the very near future so that
||||| many of these inconsistencies and integration problems can be
||||| resolved.
|||||
||||| I use the Address Book with Outlook 2003 and am always running
||||| into problems of one type or another that are very frustrating.
||||| You already have a lot of good suggestions on your FAQ site that
||||| help tremendously. But those suggestions provide workarounds that
||||| should simply become part of the default way the Address Book is
||||| used and configured rather than something that has to be searched
||||| for and manually changed within Outlook and the Address Book app.
