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Printing an Outlook address list

Phil Young looks at how to print out an address list based on your Contacts in Outlook 2003.

PRINTING AN OUTLOOK ADDRESS/PHONE LIST DIRECTORY

Here’s a tip from Phil Young, one of the Office Watch team. Phil had to print out an address book only last night, he worked out how to do it, printed the address book and then wrote up his method to share with Office Watch. So here’s his practical advice in your hands less than 24 hours after Phil has done the job himself.

” I recently had a need to print an Address Book or Phone Directory for personal use, based on my Contacts in Outlook 2003, and my preference was that it would end up as a booklet that was folded in half and stapled along the spine. The requirement was that it would use standard Letter (similar to A4) paper in order to keep printing costs to a minimum.

I know that the idea of printing onto paper is ‘old fashioned’ for some nerds out there (like Peter Deegan, our Editor in Chief who jokingly talks about “dead tree” format) but those of us in the real world actually like and need paper documents sometimes.

Printing to a multi-page booklet format that uses paper that is to be folded and stapled is not a simple matter. My previous experience has been to use specialized software that converts standard portrait-oriented Letter-sized documents into multi-paged booklet format. I’d previously used ClickBook from bluesquirrel.com with great success for such tasks but my copy was so old that it was still on 3.5″ diskette and I didn’t feel like paying for the upgrade unless I really needed to. So I decided to first check out all the printing options available to me in Outlook 2003.

Outlook 2003 provides more printing options than I expected. After much experimentation I found the solution that met my needs perfectly, which surprised me because the Outlook printing styles are quite limited and restrictive.

I selected the Contacts list then File | Print and found various formats available in Outlook 2003:



  • Card Style
  • Small Booklet Style
  • Medium Booklet Style
  • Memo Style
  • Phone Directory

I first selected the Printing option of “Medium Booklet Style” and then looked at the options available in “Page Setup”. Clicking on the “Paper” tab I then selected the “1/2-sheet booklet” option, along with Portrait orientation.

There are many other options that are worth experimenting with, including the font size (older people usually appreciate larger font size), whether you want “blank forms at end” or “contact index on side” (I unchecked both options).

The Print Preview option gives you a simple way to check the effect of the various settings quickly and without wasting paper.

Printing to both sides of the paper requires two passes, firstly printing only the Odd pages, then sending the paper through again to print only the Even pages. A printer with a duplex option removes the hassle involved in such tasks.

The result is an attractive Address or Phone booklet using your Contacts, which can be folded and stapled along the spine. Inserting the paper booklet into a vinyl or leather folder such as generally used as a cover for bibles etc helps to make the booklet a treasured item, yet one that can be regularly updated and reprinted.

ADDRESS BOOK HEADER / FOOTER

Under Print | Page Setup | Header / Footer in Outlook there are some changes worth making from the default which only shows the page number. There are boxes to enter details into the top, center and right for both Header and Footer. You can enter text or use one of the buttons at the bottom to insert some useful fields:



  • Page Number
  • Total Number of Pages
  • Date Printed
  • Time Printed
  • User Name

You can combine the first two with some text so on the screen it looks like:

[Page #] of [Total Pages]

which prints out as: 1 of 5

and there are countless variations on this such as:

Page [Page #] of [Total Pages] = Page 1 of 5

[Page #] / [Total Pages] = 1 / 5

The Date Printed is useful to make sure that you have the latest version of your contacts list. If you make printouts often you can add the Time Printed option.

The User Name is handy if several people use the same copy of Outlook with different profiles. It means each person can print their own Contacts list from the same settings.

 

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