Friday, February 8, 2008

Outlook Auto-Complete Tips

When you start typing an email address in Outlook, Outlook suggests email addresses for you to pick from. This is known as Auto-Complete and can be a great time saver or ...

It can also create a serious problem if you accidentally pick the wrong email address and send confidential information to the wrong person. Ross Kodner writes about a $1 Billion Email Auto-Complete disaster on his blog.

As almost all Outlook users use auto-complete daily, here are a few tips to get some control over it.

How to turn AutoComplete Off (or On)

I find Auto-Complete very handy but you may want to turn it off to avoid possible auto-complete disasters of your own.

On the menu click Tools and then click Options.
Click the E-Mail Options button.
Click the Advanced E-mail Options button.
Untick the "Suggest names while completing the To, Cc and Bcc fields" box.
Click OK ... until you are back in Outlook.

Deleting entries from the Auto-Complete list.

The other problem with Auto-Complete is that over time the list has email addresses that are no longer valid .... maybe email addresses have changed or you have simply stopped communicating with someone.

To remove an entry from the list so that it does not get suggested again:

Create a new email.
Start typing in the email address that you want to delete (so that Auto-Complete displays its list).
Use the up/down arrow keys to highlight the address that you want to delete.
Press the Delete key on the keyboard.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Microsoft Outlook's AutoComplete feature automatically populates email addresses in the "To" and "CC" fields. If you begin to type the name of a commonly used addressee, AutoComplete will make a best guess as to the name you're typing and provide several suggestions in a dropdown list.