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Using Outlook as a Contact Management Database

By Lasa Information Systems Team

Outlook 2000 - Email software that can also help manage your contacts.

'We're looking for some database software to help us manage our contacts. We used to use DataEase, then we tried Access, but it was just too difficult: we simply haven't got the skills to set it up. We were thinking of paying a consultant to develop something, but that is so expensive: all we want to do is to manage names and addresses. Can you help'

So runs a very common call to the Lasa IT Helpline. It's never been easy to find a cheap solution to suit a small agency with limited resources, but now, almost unnoticed, a plausible solution has emerged. Best of all, you may already own it or be able to get an upgrade: the solution is Outlook. 

Outlook is a component of Microsoft Office and is usually mentioned last after Word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint, and used by many people only for email. Outlook is a substantial application in its own right providing other modules in addition to e-mail, including a calendar, to-do lists, a journal for time recording, and a contacts database.

It's easy to overlook the fact that the Contacts module is a database, but Outlook provides a surprisingly capable system for managing names and addresses. Contacts provides different views of your data, including table and card formats. You can define your own views and add your own fields. There are good searching facilities and it also provides a set of categories, again user definable, which can be used to tag records for retrieval. So, providing your needs are straightforward, it is well worth looking at Outlook as a way of managing your names and addresses.

So why haven't we mentioned it before? After all, Outlook has been around for years in its previous incarnations of Outlook 97 and 98. The breakthrough came with Office 2000, the version which, at long last, is properly integrated with the rest of Microsoft Office. Previous versions of Outlook offered such poor integration with Word that it was just about impossible to select a group of records from Outlook and then export it to Word for mail merge. It was said that the Outlook team had their own building on the Microsoft campus in Seattle and never spoke to the Office lot.

Not any more. Office 2000 (and later versions) now provide reasonably good integration with Word. It is possible to go into Outlook select a set of records, press mail merge and move seamlessly into Word to complete the process of producing standard letters or mailing labels. (Word 2000 also provides very useful facility of mail merge to email.)

This is good news for managing mail merge by keeping a number of different mail merge data files for different mailings, with the problem of having to update them separately. It now possible to keep each name and address once in Outlook and tag it with different category codes for each separate mailing.

Outlook won't be enough for everyone. Its reporting facilities are quite limited and so if you want to do more elaborate printouts you may have to look elsewhere.   It is possible to produce reports by attaching Access 2000 to Outlook data but that has its limits and doesn't square with the idea of a cheap and easy database.

It is also difficult to share address books across your organisation unless you have Exchange running (and even then it is pretty tricky to set up).

If you need a more powerful and flexible system there are a number of databases around aimed at voluntary organisations. For information on issues to consider when choosing a database, see the database section of the knowledgebase.

The IT for Charities Web site lists a large number of database products with links to more information.

More information on Outlook can be found on Microsoft's website.