What Should Your List Contain?

Beyond name, address, and phone number, what do you want to know when you look up a contact? Think about how you organize your contact information now: By location? Size or type of account? Company name or contact name?

Assign a category for each item of information you want to keep. Each category of information has its own column. Each row contains all the information for a single contact.

Do you already have some names and addresses in a file?   Microsoft Excel can read your text file. Click Open (File menu). In the Files of type box, select Text Files. Keep your column headings visible on the screen   Position the pointer in column A directly below the headings, then click Freeze Panes (Window menu) to keep the heading row at the top of the window while you enter and scroll through the rows of data.

Guidelines for Creating a Contact List

Label the columns with your categories   Enter one contact per row. The order of the columns isn’t important—you can easily rearrange them or add more categories later.

Want to find people by their surnames?   Put first and last names in separate columns.

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Make the column headings stand out   Format them as bold, underlined, or a different color. From differently formatted headings, Microsoft Excel can detect that you’re creating a list and can help you manage its contents.

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Avoid blank lines, lines of dashes, and extra spaces   The automatic list-detection feature looks for contiguous ranges of cells containing data to determine the boundaries of your list. Use borders if you want to separate the column headings from the data. Use the alignment buttons to position text within cells.

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Want to know more?   Look up Getting Results - Business List in Help.