How to Create Your Own Contact Groups in Outlook
By Tana M. Mann Easton, Lead Efficiency Engineer
When working at a medium to large firm, it’s not uncommon for the company to have preset email contact groups. There may be a contact group for all employees of the firm, for all employees in each regional office, for all managers, for specific teams, etc. You can also create your own personalized email contact groups in Outlook.
At one of my past jobs, there was a firm preset email contact group for all employees in our regional office. However, that contact group included people who didn’t work in our office like the managing director of the region and some IT people. So if I wanted to send an email to only the people who actually worked in our office, I would send it to my own office contact group.
I’ve also had my own personalized email contact groups for friend groups in and outside of work. Each time I email those set groups of friends, I don’t have to add each of their email addresses to the message, I can just type in their contact group name that includes each of their email addresses.
Setting up a contact group in Outlook is easy. Navigate to your contacts screen in Outlook, and under the Home tab, click on New Contact Group.
A new window for the Untitled Contact Group will pop up. You should name your contact group. This will be what you type into your emails going forward when wanting to communicate with this group. So maybe I would call my group “Work Friends” if I’m creating a group for my friends at work that I communicate with all the time.
Now you are ready to click on the Add Members button. You can either add email addresses from your Outlook contacts, from your address book, or a new email contact. Once you’ve added all the email addresses you want to include in the contact group, you would hit the Save & Close button. You should now be able to type in “Work Friends” or whatever you named your contact group in order to send an email to many people without typing in each of their individual email addresses.
If you consistently send emails to the same groups of people, I highly recommend setting up some personalized contact groups of your own. Typing in a word or two for the name of the contact group will take you less time than typing each email address.
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