Suppose I have the following list of contacts in my Outlook Personal Contacts folder that represent the customers and prospects I’m currently dealing with. (For details on how to import this set of data, if you’d like to try the exercises described, please refer to Importing the Sample Data).

I want to get a listing of just those contacts that are owners or managers on the West Coast (of the United States), grouped by area and then sorted by Last Name/First Name, say for the purposes of sending them a newsletter or direct mailing.

In order to do this, I need to create a View in Outlook. A view is a sub-set of my data in a particular folder that is grouped, sorted, and filtered according to specified criteria.

So the task before us is to create a view that will:

1.         display the fields Last Name, First Name, Company, Job Title, Phone Number in the view.

2.         group these contacts by State.

3.         sort the contacts by Last Name, then by First Name.

4.         show only contacts that are Owners or Managers of companies located on the west coast of the United States.

5.         prevent In-Cell Editing so we can quickly skip to the contacts in a particular state by typing in the first letter(s) of the state.

6.         highlight Owners in green, so that they can be easily identified.