Finding recently entered Contacts in Outlook

Reader John Easly asks:

We have many users sharing a contacts folder in Outlook. Contact entries are not done in a consistent way. Wondering if there is a way to review contact entries in a given timeframe entered in a fixed timeframe, maybe once a week. In general seeking best practices to monitor correct/consistent entry of contact information when there are multiple users sharing the same folder.

I honestly didn't know if this was possible, so I spent some time fiddling around with fields in Outlook and I think I might have an answer for John.

First, though, he didn't tell us whether he was sharing a Contacts folder using Exchange, or was just sharing a PST file among a bunch of his users. If he's doing it through Exchange, no harm will befall John or his progeny. However, if he's trying to share a single PST file, he's simply living on borrowed time. We've said it over and over again: PST files are not to be shared, they are not multi-user aware, and they will corrupt horribly.

So let's assume John's practicing safe contacts and using Exchange. As far as I know, there's no directly supported way to find recently entered contacts in Outlook, but I may have come up with a hack. Whenever I want to do something in Outlook, one of the first places I look is the Field Chooser.

As Figure A shows, you can bring up the Field Chooser by right-clicking in the area next to the field header. This location is important. Click much above or below and you won't get the menu.

Once you select Field Chooser, the Field Chooser shown in Figure B will appear. There are all sorts of categories to choose from, and I'd play with each. But for what John wants, I recommend flipping the drop-down menu to All Mail fields and then selecting Created, as shown in Figure B.

Next, drag the Created panel to your field headers and drop it. The little red arrow in Figure C is actually provided by Outlook and indicates where you're dropping the field.

While the Field Chooser is up, you can drag and drop fields where you want, or drag them off the header strip to delete them.

Here's what a snippet of my contact list looked like after I added the Created field, as shown in Figure D.

John's going to have to do some experimenting, because I can't guarantee that these dates are exactly what he's looking for, especially since they're theoretically "Mail" fields. But I didn't find any other created or modified date field that seemed even marginally accurate.

So there you go. Your Outlook hack for this week. Enjoy!