# Sorting categories in Outlook 2003



## TGHC (Nov 10, 2004)

Hi there

This is my first post in this forum, I hope you can help me from tearing out what litle hair I have left.

After using a dedicated contact manager for several years, I switched to outlook. Ok so far...... I have customised the view so that it shows name company tel, etc. Sorting these is easy by just clicking the bar at the top of each column, however the final column I have is "categories" and when I attempt to sort it the same way I get a dialogue box "you cannot sort this field".

Is there a way around this, or will I have to use groups or some similar method.

thanks in advance

TGHC


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## TGHC (Nov 10, 2004)

Does no one know the answer to this,


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## SteveyBoy (Sep 16, 2004)

Do you actually have any contacts in relevant categories?


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## ros (Nov 12, 2004)

Right click on the headers and select 'arrange by' and then categories. Outlook then sorts all your contacts into categories.

Hope that saves your hair!


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## Dr. Graymatter (Nov 12, 2004)

*Sorting Outlook contacts by category*

The reason you can't simply click on the column header to sort by category is that any one contact might belong to multiple categories and would need to appear multiple times to be properly arranged.

Outlook does this gracefully with the "By Category" view, which is accessed from the View...Current View menu. This option groups your contact records into collapsible sections, one per category.

Hope that helps!
Dr. Graymatter


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## mjoury (Nov 22, 2004)

There is a way that Outlook 2003 allows you to click to sort by category. To do this do the following:

Option 1.
View->Arrange By->Current View->Define Views
Select the view you want to change and click "Modify..."
Select "Group By..."
Select the check box "Automatically group according to arrangement"
Apply your changes to the view
Now if you click on a column header it automatically groups by the selected column.

Option 2. 
Without changing your view you may right click on the column header and select "Group By This Field".

Note that it appears that unlike with Outlook 2000 and I suspect 2002 (although I can not remember for sure and am not running it on any machines to test) when you click on a column header to sort WITHIN a category view it overrides the category view and actually changes the view definition. The way around this is to hold down the shift key while clicking a column header to sort. While the view definition DOES change at least you retain the "By Category" view and are allowed to sort within categories.

I have found that Outlook 2003 has many nice features that offer more power than earlier versions but sometimes (as in the above sort within a category view) they are NOT intuitive. In older version all you had to do was click on the header and it would sort within the limitaions of the current view. I would have MUCH prefered that this was retianed in 2003 -- with the default to sort within the current view and the shift option to resort the entire list.

Hope this helps.


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