How to Create a Drop-down List in Outlook Contact Form

Outlook supports you to design forms, no matter the message, task, appointment or contact form. Have you ever wanted to create a drop-down list in the default forms? This article will take Contact form as an example and teach you to create a custom drop-down list.

When I create new contact, I tend to input the relationship with this contact, such as colleague, superior, friend, relative and others. In the past, I just created a new custom field called as “Relationship”, like the following screenshot:

In this case, I can type the concrete relationship info in the custom field. But I still hope that I can customize a drop-down list, which can offer my frequently used options. Thereby, I can click the down arrow and just choose the relation instead of manually typing. It will be quite convenient. After some researches, I lastly find a quick method. Here are the detailed steps.

Create a Drop-down List in Outlook Contact Form

1. For a start, launch Outlook and go to Contact pane.
2. Then click “New Contact”.
3. In the new contact window, switch to “Developer” tab and click “Design This Form” button.
4. Next you should create a new page. Take the steps below:

• Firstly turn to “(P.2)”tab.
• Then hit “Page” button in the ribbon and choose “Rename Page” option.
• Next specify a new name for this page.
• Lastly click “OK” button.

5. After that, click on “Control Toolbox” button. In the new “Toolbox” dialog box, hit the “Label” icon, namely the icon with Letter “A”. Then drag the cursor to create a frame for the new label.
6. Subsequently, right click on the new label and choose “Properties”.
7. In the “Properties” dialog, input “Relationship” in both “Name” and “Caption” field. Optionally you can change the font settings.
8. And then you ought to select the “ComboBox” icon in “Toolbox”, namely the last controls in the first line. Drag the cursor to create a combobox.
9. After that, right click the combobox and choose “Properties”.
10. In the following dialog, switch to “Value” tab and hit “New” button. Name it as “Relationship” and click “OK”.
11. Now you can input the drop-down options and use the semicolon to connect the possible values, such as “Colleague;Superior;Friend;Relative;Others”.
12. After clicking “OK”, you’ve completed creating the drop-down list. You can try to run this form before publishing it. Click “Run This Form” button in “Form” group.
13. In the new screen, you can turn to “Custom” page and then check the custom drop-down list, shown as the image below:
14. Now you can publish this form.
15. Finally you can apply this new form to all the contact folders. Right click on a contact folder and set “When posting to this folder, use:” to the new form.

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Author Introduction:

Shirley Zhang is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including repair corrupted SQL Server and outlook repair software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com