Organizing Your Contacts and Address Lists
Also see: Helpful books on MS Outlook program for Email and Contacts from Amazon.
Organizing your contacts and address lists
Many of us trying to get a head start on the holidays start to think about getting our contacts organized when fall season arrives.
This may involve getting loose names and addresses into better order. It may involve printing out pruning our email lists. It may raise the question of what software can help keep contacts more up-to-date and organized in the future.
If updating or simplifying your contacts and addresses is on your mind, here are a few tips I can share from my own experience:
Email contact lists in most cases can be downloaded in a format that allows for "table style" editing and printing.
Most people in the past have relied on Word or Excel type tables to organize contacts, but free Open Office software can do the same thing and runs well on most windows versions.
Assembling your contacts information one place or one document can make the updating far easier than doing it piecemeal.
If you're using a smart phone, or email service, or table type file to keep up half or more of your personal contacts, that simplifies filling in the missing contacts or information missing.
A few hours of organizing your contact information in a format that works well on your computer can save you incredible amounts of time and effort for months and years to come. Even keeping up with just a few dozen contacts make it all worthwhile.
In my own work, I rely on Office type spreadsheets, CSV file formatting, and a few specialized software programs to transfer and clean up my contacts - especially personal names, addresses, phones and emails.
When I organize this task for myself or others, I find it helps to 1) get the biggest chunk of contact listings into a printable format - then 2) cross out, edit, or write in corrections or additions - then 3) type in the changes to update the main contacts file - to then 4) save, upload and/or print out in clean copy.
The end result I seek is to have my contacts available to me both on my computer and in an easy to use printed document.
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