Hey everyone, Daniel here from TwinBytes with another quick tech-torial for you.
This time on the Microsoft Outlook autocomplete feature
we're going to talk about the auto complete email addresses in Outlook
why you shouldn't rely on them instead of your address book,
what the limits are, and how to manage it. In Outlook what you do is
you can start typing in the first few letters of something that
you're looking for and you'll be able to then select that person to email
but the problem is with a lot of people they rely on that heavily and they don't
put anything in their address book and what you don't know is these
email addresses come and go because this list is only comprised of the
SMTP addresses, legacy exchangeDN entries, and display names for people
whom you've sent an email to previously. Now most of you may not know
half of what I just mentioned here but the important thing
is when you're emailing someone, if you're replying to an email
that they sent you, they automatically get added to your auto complete list.
So when you start typing in a letter
they appear in that drop down list and as you continue typing it
narrows it down until you find the person that you're looking for;
and it's also important to know that this
list for Outlook is specific to Outlook and it's not shared with the
Outlook Web Access which is the online equivalent to Outlook
now there is a limit here and a lot of people don't realize this that
there's a limit of a thousand entries in here, and a thousand
may sound like a lot but if you consider how
many people you email I've seen this already with myself that
there's someone i haven't emailed in a while and then i was going to
email them and look it up because they weren't my address book and they weren't
there because I've already emailed that many more people since then
so it automatically manages this list for you and removes anyone that's
too old. So it's going to keep the limit to a thousand entries.
Back in 2003 the limit was a thousand
and for Outlook 2007 they had a limit of 2,000 entries but then I guess they
found that there was too much corruption happening
then so they put the limit back down to a thousand entries in 2010.
So you have to realize that if you want to
keep anyone in your address book to make sure that
you don't lose them and you can contact them again later
then add them to your address book don't just rely on this auto complete
now you can manage this a little bit. What you'll find is when
you start typing in the name for somebody
that you want to get rid of, then you'll find them in the list here
and as you hover over each name you'll see an x appear on the far right.
and then you would just need to
click on that x and it will delete them from that list
and it'll free up one name out of the thousand entries that you have
so that's one thing that you can do for managing it
now the problem is if you just go through the alphabet and go through
all the A's, B's, C's, just typing in the first letter you're
getting only some of the names. As I type in one more letter I'm getting
another name that wasn't in that initial list
So if I had like cb now I'll take out the b
and say cc then I'm getting different names again. So this can be almost
impossible to go through the entire list
and find people that you don't need anymore.
you would have to know who you're looking for specifically that you don't
want to have in there anymore and start typing in just enough to find
them, and then you can remove them from your list.
You can also manage turning this on and off.
If you go under the file menu in Outlook
down to options and then you want to go to the mail tab.
and in here if you scroll down part way you'll get down to the send
messages section and down here you'll see the use auto complete list to
suggest names when typing. So you would want to have that turned on
if you do want to use that. If you want to make sure that you're not
relying on that feature and that you are specifically relying on your address book,
then you maybe want to turn that off
but it is helpful if you're just responding to someone temporarily
and you're trying to remember who they were but
you don't really want to have them in your address book permanently
then this comes in handy. But as long as you know
that once you hit that thousand limit which you're constantly at a thousand so
it's constantly deleting the oldest one and keeping the most recent ones that
you use most often. If there's a problem with this and you
need to troubleshoot it or you just want to start fresh
there's a button right here to empty the autocomplete list and that'll wipe it out
and allow you to start fresh.
That's it for this quick tech-torial. I hope you guys found it helpful
and if you did please give it a thumbs up, subscribe if you haven't already,
and we'll see you in the next video. Alright, thanks so much!
Bye for now!