Bug in the Catagories search menu - doesn't check for extra words,

[Guest]

I have two Catagories;
"News Letter - Sent It" and
"News Letter - Don't send It"

Yesterday I sent an email to contacts with only the "News Letter - Send It"
catagory (check box selected), but I got the contacts with the "News Letter -
Don't Send It" as well
That catagory should not have been a match because it had extra characters,
but apparantly the search was not working properly.

I asked on of our software programmers to have a look and he said try
manually typing quotes around the catagory I'm searching so it'll be more
specific, and that worked fine. But I think that this should be improve on
as it was nice to open up the master list in a menu and jsut use check boxes
to define you search. Ithink this is a very easy fix to the program, and my
goofy catagoriers, being so similar got caught by it.

I have since done a global Catagory update using the following;
New Letter - Yes
News Letter - No
Just so I don't send the darn News Letter to my suppliers and competitors
AGAIN, LOL

 

[ProfDD]

I have two Catagories;
"News Letter - Sent It" and
"News Letter - Don't send It"

Yesterday I sent an email to contacts with only the "News Letter - Send It"
catagory (check box selected), but I got the contacts with the "News Letter -
Don't Send It" as well
.....

I have since done a global Catagory update using the following;
New Letter - Yes
News Letter - No
Just so I don't send the darn News Letter to my suppliers and competitors
AGAIN, LOL

Newsletter is one word, not two.

I would assume that eliminating the spaces would solve the problem,
although I haven't tested that assumprtion.

 

[Guest]

Ya, I think it searches word by word.
But I think since spaces are allowed to be entered into catagories, the
search should handle them better IMHO.
Thanks,

 

[Judy Gleeson MVP - Outlook]

I don't see why you even need to search to send an email to Contacts where a
field contains a certain value. Use the Phone List View of Contacts, use
the Group By Box and you can drag the column Header into the Group By box.
This will separate the yes from the no. And adds the benefit of you seeing
exactly what's actually going on in the folder.

You could also define a view of the Contacts folder.

Judy Gleeson - MVP Outlook
Acorn Training and Consulting
Canberra, Australia


see what Outlook training can do to improve productivity:
www.acorntraining.com.au/pdfdocs/ProductivITwithOutlook.pps

www.acorntraining.com.au/productivit.htm

 

[Guest]

Hi Judy, Thanks for your quick and suggestions,

Yes, I too like the phone list view, and sorting by fileds is great (is this
what you mean by "group by box"), but you can not sort a Catagory field which
is what I use to control my "Newsletter" in my contact base. I get an
"error, can not sort by this field".

Previously, I did create a user definable field called "Newsletter" with a
"Yes" and a "No" as choices, but this filed was a little more work to get to
when adding new contacts. Plus, after reading tips, etc, it seams the
Catagories field is the recommended field to use for this type of grouping.
I like the Catagories feature as I have changed my Master Catagories so the
selections are nicely predefined to suite our company (only on my computer
thou, I wish it was stored on a per "contact folder bases", as this is a
company wide contact folder on the Xchange server that many people share, and
having a "Master Catagories" dished out to all clients would help ensure
consistancy in the Catagories definitions when adding new contacts).

For me, the Catagories field is faster to access with it being located right
on the main page of the contact. Anyway, I haven't take the training coarses
you mentionned, so there's likely better ways of doing things, please let me
know if I'm doing something wrong, etc, Thanks, Brad

PS, I also like use the "search" feature to confirm that all my "Newletter-
Yes" contacts have an "@" symbol in the email address field, because if they
don't have an email address, i get a warning that Outlook can't find the
address for "john doe" and I have no choice but to abort the send.

 

[Guest]

Interesting; the "group by box" under the "View" menu,,, I'll have to play
more with it and see if it'll do what I want. Thanks,

 

[ProfDD]

Hi Judy, Thanks for your quick and suggestions,

Yes, I too like the phone list view, and sorting by fileds is great (is this
what you mean by "group by box"), but you can not sort a Catagory field which
is what I use to control my "Newsletter" in my contact base. I get an
"error, can not sort by this field".

"Group by" is not equal to "Sort by"

"Group by" is one of the basic capabilities in Views, which are, in
turn, one of the basic tools for customizing Outlook. You should take a
look at them.