The task defined for us is to get a listing of just those contacts who are marketing decision makers on the West Coast (of the United States).

My first challenge is to identify the fields in my Outlook Contacts folder that equate to these individual criteria.

So in this example how would I identify a “marketing decision maker”? This might be anybody that has the word “Marketing” in their Job Title, but is also a Manager, Director, Vice President, etc. I could single out each of these Job Titles individually, so as to include Marketing Manager, Marketing Director, Marketing Vice President, Vice President – Marketing, etc. However, if I look at my data carefully I notice that I can just exclude “Assistant” in this particular case, as Marketing Assistants would not typically be decision makers. So my first condition would be:

Job Title contains the word “Marketing”

but

Job Title does not contain the word “Assistant”.

Notice we use the “Contains” operator so that we include those contacts with “Marketing” anywhere in the Job Title, such as Marketing Manager, Vice President - Marketing, etc.

The next condition is contacts “located on the West Coast” (of the United States). So here I would use the State field to “home in” on the required contacts. So the conditions would be:

State = “WA”

State = “OR”

State = “CA”

However, joining these particular conditions together requires an elementary knowledge of what is known as Boolean Algebra (AND/OR and NOT Conditions).