what is most effective way of tracking couples in contacts?

Thread view:

Enable EMail Alerts

Start New Thread

Thread rating:

Mr. Perfect - 09 Sep 2005 05:30 GMT

I work with couples. To manage couples in Outlook 2003 Contacts is it
preferable to create separate contact records for each or is there a better
way of entering their contact data?

Reply to this Message

Vince Averello [MVP-Outlook] - 09 Sep 2005 12:23 GMT

I group families by using the Company Name field. That way you can group by
company and see the people belonging to that unit/pairing/etc.

>I work with couples. To manage couples in Outlook 2003 Contacts is it
> preferable to create separate contact records for each or is there a
> better
> way of entering their contact data?

Reply to this Message

Mr. Perfect - 12 Sep 2005 03:55 GMT

Thanks
Good idea..I'll give it a try.
Mr. Perfect

> I group families by using the Company Name field. That way you can group by
> company and see the people belonging to that unit/pairing/etc.
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
> > better
> > way of entering their contact data?

Reply to this Message

ProfDD - 12 Sep 2005 18:07 GMT

Vince:

What do you do with their actual employers' names, then ?

I've experimented with using the "Contacts" field to link folks in the
same family or sharing an e-mail address or residence. Not
satisfactory because different things may be being shared. Logical
correctness would require a User Field, but, in practice, the
data-entry discipline seems to hard even for a single user.

One thing for sure, the spouse field seems to be a poor tool for the
job in most cases. One might as well just put the spouse's name in the
notes field with a tag.

Reply to this Message

scooper - 31 Jul 2007 16:26 GMT

Hi, I'm playing with this as well as sometimes it's appropriate to send
stuff to a couple / family whereas other times it's more appropriate to
contact individuals. It's all a bit complicated so we're definately having
one record per person.

In terms of linking them, however, the "contacts" field is rather limited
(as it doesn't define relationship at all) and there doesn't seem to be a
"contact" type of field in the custom options (doh! as obvious solution would
be to make a custom form and stick "spouse", "siblings" etc on it if the
field type would allow an actual link to the other contact/s).

So anyway, the route I'm moving towards is creating a separate contacts
folder with families in it and linking all the members of the family to that.
It's all a bit cumbersome but hopefully I'll be able to figure some of this
scripting stuff out to help.

If anyone has better idea, I'm all ears!
Sam

Reply to this Message