Creating an Outlook Contact Group

I received several requests for directions showing how to create a contact group in Microsoft Outlook. Many teachers use this to create a list of parent emails in case they need to email all parents the same message. This particular video shows how to do so in Office 2016. I'm starting in my inbox area and I'm going to navigate to my people page. So if I click the three dots and then click people, it takes me to my list of contacts. At the top of the screen you'll see an option that says new contact group. It automatically opens a new contact group and I'm going to name mine sample group. So give it a name first and then you can add members. Click the add members button and you have some options. The first one is from your Outlook contacts, the second is from your address book, and the last one is create new email contact. This is what most of you will use at the beginning of the year. When I click new email contact, a new window appears. The first option is for the display name. You can either include the contact's actual name or you can include the student's name and then put parent out beside it. I'm going to use John Doe for this tutorial and I'm going to go ahead and enter his email address as johndoe8 at yahoo.com. You don't have to worry about changing the email type but I do recommend you verify that this check box is checked right here. What this does is it adds this contact member to your group as well as adding them as an individual contact to your list of people in your Outlook contact list. I can now click the okay button. I have my first contact added. Now I can go back to add members and new email contact. Again the window appears and I can add my next contact in my list. Again I make sure that the add to contacts button is selected. Click okay. So now I have two contacts. You can add as many as you need to your distribution list. And then in the top left corner make sure you click save and close. Once I save my group, it brings me back to my contacts list. Since I named these contacts, if I search Doe, you see I now have an individual contact for johndoe8 and johndoe9. And if I search for sample, you see I now have sample group. Notice that on a group, you have three people showing in your list right here on the icon. But if I simply search for individual contacts, it shows a single person. So that's a quick way to know if the email you compose is going to an individual or to a group of people. If I want to email an individual user in my contacts list, I can simply click their name and then click the mail button over here on the right. And it composes a new email message to just that user. If I want to send an email to a contact group with multiple people, I do the same thing. I search for the group name, click the name of the group, and click the email button on the right side. And you can now see inside this group if I click to expand it, it shows that I have two users in this group. If you have any questions about how to create contact groups or use them as a distribution list, please leave a message in the comments below and I'll get back to you.