How to make a new contact group and how to import contacts in Outlook!

Outlook has come a long way from an email client to an entire information manager. It can help you manage your emailing priorities really well, but more than that, it can also be used as a professional calendar app and to manage your address book.

Contact Group In Outlook and How to Import Contact to It

Today we are discussing two specific tasks related to address book: how to import contacts from a CSV file and how to add a new contact group, which is another term for distribution lists.

Import Contacts from a CSV or PST File

You can import contacts from an external file called CSV, comma separated vales, and also from Outlook native file called PST.

For instance, if you want your contacts from an IMAP based email account, you can use the web interface to first export all the contacts to a CSV file and then import it into Outlook. Many users choose that option to get their contacts from Gmail to Outlook.

To import:

1. Go to ‘File’ > Open & Export > Import/Export
2. Select “Import from another program or file” > and click next
3. Select either ‘comma separated values’ or ‘Outlook data file’ and click next
4. Browse to the location your file is located and select it.
5. Choose what to do with the duplicate items, if found any
6. Click ‘Next’
7. Select the account where you want the contacts to be saved. If it’s an IMAP account, those will also be synced to the servers.

How to make a new contact group or distribution lists

Outlook now calls distribution lists and contact groups. A contact group is a way to send emails to multiple contacts in that group without having to manually add each address at a time. You can simply recall the entire list of contacts from the group by the groups’ name.

To a make a new group:

1. Click on ‘New Items’ > Contact Group (on the home tab of the Outlook ribbon when ‘People’ is open)
2. Name the group whatever you want, but make it easy to remember. Such as: technical support staff
3. Either double-click on the empty space below or click on “Add Members” to add the contacts.
4. You can also click on “Add Members” > New contact, if the contact you want to add is not saved in any of the address book
5. From the new ‘Select members’ dialog box, you can either scroll to find the contact you want to add or type in the search field to search for the particular contact.
6. Double-click the contact or select a contact and then click no “members” button below, and then click “OK.”

To send an email to a group is easy. Instead of typing the email address in the ‘To’ field, you just type in the name of the group. As you type in the name of the group, Outlook will automatically suggest you the groups you already created. Just select the group from the suggestion and all the email addresses will be added in the ‘To’ field.

You can do all the regular tasks with a contact or a group, such as sharing them with other users, modifying them, exporting them to a local file, and so on.

We hope the above information makes your work in Outlook more efficient when it comes to importing contacts and using contact groups/lists.