Sort your Outlook Express contacts in address book

By default, Outlook Express will automatically sort your address book contact list by name (when available, otherwise by email address), using first name first, and last name second. But as you'll learn in this tutorial, you can sort your Outlook Express contacts by a different piece of information, and even sort your contacts in reverse order, in just a click!

Reorder your contacts in Outlook Express

This is how easily you can change the sort order of your address book contacts:

• Once inside Outlook Express, press Ctrl+Shift+B or pick "Address book" from the Tools menu. The right pane in the address book window contains your contacts, you will notice four columns: Name, E-Mail Address, Business Phone, and Home Phone.
• By default, the "Name" column shows an upward pointing arrow: this means that Outlook Express is currently sorting your address book contacts by name, in alphabetical order, and ascending order (from A to Z).
  
  
• To reverse the sort order of your contacts, and use descending order (from Z to A), just click on the "Name" column header as shown below: Outlook Express will reverse the sort order for contacts based on the column header you clicked! (which now shows a down-pointing arrow). That's all you need to do to reverse the sort order in the address book, and it works with all visible column headers!
• Here's another way you can get more control over how your contacts are sorted: while still inside the address book window, click on the View menu, and choose "Sort By": note that the top segment and bottom segment of the submenu only let you do the same thing we did, and the initial approach was more intuitive. But in the middle section of that Sort By submenu, Outlook Express lets you choose to sort alphabetically by First Name or by Last Name, when you click on the Name column.
  
  

Combined with the ability to search your address book to find people, sorting them (or not) alphabetically makes it just easier to quickly locate the contact you were looking for.