This article was adapted from Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 Inside Out by Jim Boyce. Visit Microsoft Learning to buy this book.

It's easy to make changes to Outlook items, and contacts are no exception. Just open the Contacts folder, make whatever changes you need, and click Save and Close. That's easy enough! But what if you need to make the same change to lots of contacts? For example, let's say the fax number has changed for a company you work with frequently, and you have twenty contacts in your Contacts folder from that company? Changing the fax number field in each of those twenty contacts one at a time certainly isn't a difficult thing to do, but it would take some time. You'd have to open each one, change the fax number, and close the contact form. You probably have much better and more productive ways to spend your time!

Regardless of what you need to change, it's actually easy to make the same change to multiple contacts in Outlook without having to open, modify, and save each one. The trick is to use Outlook to group items in the Contacts folder view to organize the contacts, and then use a quick drag-and-drop operation to make the change.

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