A Few Windows Tips

Mailing Lists and Address Books

General

Most of us keep some sort of Address Book (or possibly a Mailing List) on our computer, if for nothing other than helping us remember the email addresses of all our friends. Depending on a number of factors, our use of these Address books may be more or less sophisticated. The purpose of this article is to provide some tips on how to organize such an Address Book, how to send email to multiple people, how to print mailing labels, how to print your address book, and finally, how to transfer it from one software program to another.

I assume that you use either Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) as a mail program, and that you have at your disposal either Microsoft Excel, or some other spreadsheet program such as provided by Corel or StarOffice.

Definition of an Address Book

For the purpose of this article, an Address Book or Mailing List is a list of names of companies or people, their address, their telephone number, their email address and possibly other information (fax number, portable number, business address, title, birthday, notes, etc).

Software

An address book can be created in a spreadsheet program such as Excel where you define the fields and how to use them, or it can be created in a program specifically designed to hold names and addresses such as Microsoft Outlook.

The difference between these two kinds of software is important because a program such as Excel is a general purpose spreadsheet and thus to use it, you must explicitly specify all the rows and columns and what they are used for. On the other hand, a program such as Microsoft Outlook (Contacts) or the Address Book of Netscape are really database programs with predefined fields (such as FirstName, LastName, Address), where you enter the appropriate information.

If you have a choice, it is almost always better to start an Address Book with a database program such as Netscape or Microsoft Outlook. The reason is that these programs are specifically designed for capturing such information and typically offer quite a number of useful features such as sorting and selection. Though such features can be accomplished with spreadsheet programs such as Excel, you must generally be a more advanced user.

Outlook Example

For example, below, is a typical Outlook dialogue box for adding contact information:

and if I click on the Details tab, I get the following:

Netscape Example

After exporting the above example from Outlook to a TAB file then importing it into the Netscape Address Book (details on how to do this later), it looks like the following:

and in the expanded version:

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