Pocket PC Tips and Tricks

Seven ways to find your contacts fast

Some Pocket PC users have complained that its hard to find individual contacts in the Contact list. There are some obvious and less obvious ways to find them fast.

1. If you know the last name of your contact, tap on the appropriate alphabetical tab to go to that part of the list. For example, tap on the "fgh" tab to find Rich Hall.
2. Use the categories field to sort Contacts list on the category (see Screen 1). You can assign categories to new or existing contacts. For example, a number of other people write for Pocket PC magazine. I could assign all of these contacts the category "Author." When I wanted to look up someone who I know was an author, I would select that category for the pull-down list at the top left of the screen. Contacts would display a list of authors. You can create new categories on the fly. If you have a number of contacts at one company, you might create a special category for that company.



Screen 1: You can use Contact's Categories sort option to find contacts in the Pocket PC.

3. You can use the Pocket PC's Find feature to search for key words in any of the built-in applications. For example, if you knew the contacts lived in San Francisco, you could go to your Start menu, select Find, enter "San Francisco" under Find, and select Contacts in the Type field. Press "Go" and Find will pull up all contacts from San Francisco (see Screen 2).



Screen 2: You can use Find to search for company names or geographic locations in Contacts.

4. The Casio PocketPCs come with Casio's mobile Address Book. This can display the Contacts list by the individual's last name, or by the company name. It also has a Find feature. (Note: Mobile Address Book uses the same database file as the built-in Contacts program. Make a change in one application and it appears in the other.)
5. You can sort contacts with the "File As" option in outlook 2000. Then , when you synchronize your Pocket PC, that sort order is transferred to the Pocket PC. For example, I opened Outlook 2000 Contacts on my desktop PC. Then I opened each individual contact, and went to the "File as:" field (below "Company:" in the General tab). The pull-down list let me sort by the persons first or last name, by the company name, or by a combination of the two. I went through all 1,900 of my contacts on my desktop PC. When I synchronized my iPAQ Pocket PC, they appeared in the File As sort order.
6. Related to the previous point, you can change the File As default to Company. In Outlook 2000 on your desktop PC, go to the Tools menu and select Options, Preference tab, and then Contact Options. Change the setting to Company. Any future contacts you enter will be sorted by Company. Unfortunately, you will have to manually change the File As field in existing desktop PC contacts as described in point 5. Also, Pocket Outlook does not have this feature and defaults to a "last name, first name" sort. You'll have to manually change the "File As" field to "Company" in Outlook 2000 after you synchronize data.
7. Some Pocket Pc users put the company name in the Name field, and the individual's name in the Company field. That causes company names to appear in the Contacts list view. You might try putting an abbreviation of the company name followed by the individual's last name in the Name field. For example, "PPCMag - Hall" for Rich Hall at Pocket PC magazine.