Topic: Outlook For Idiots? (IE: me)

[Blinkin]

Hello guys:

I really don't know if there is an answer for this, a lot of web searching and *cringe* years of effort has driven me knuts and I'm hoping that someone can provide an answer at last.

How in hell do you find your contacts and "see" them in outlook?!? I'm using office 2013 and there doesn't seem to be a way for a blind user to do it. All of the google searches that I've done all end up with the same directions, but what do you do if you can't "click on People"?

I've managed to get into the address book with a Cntl+shift+B shortcut key, but it doesn't actually show me the address book, just search options that, apparently, doesn't work. I've tried going through the ribbon (Which I hate), options under file and then People, but all I get there are options on how to organize contacts, not actually see them.

The reason that I want to get into the frigging thing is that over the years, I've built up a seriously huge issue with mis-sent emails to non-existant addresses, domain names that, apparently, doesn't exist and generally getting every address that I send to placed into the thing. I need to prune a lot of entries out of the thing so I'm not sending to the wrong or non-existant mailbox. It came to a head yesterday when I spent 2 hours trying to send an attachment to a friend and the autocomplete kept coming up with addresses that have been entered incorrectly or is missing a letter or something in the address. It's troublesome to find that you have 5 different, but similar addresses and you never know which one will appear.

Anyway, thanks for any help that you can offer.

Blinkin

[Gypsy]

Your problem may not be the contacts list, but rather the auto complete cache.    Outlook does not just pull its information from the contacts list when you start typing in an email, but from its memory of who you've previously emailed.

I found out recently that sometimes, helpful Outlook will even override the correct email address you've entered and replace it with a mis-typed address that it has in its auto-complete memory. 

Unless you've manually added these incorrect email addresses to your contacts, the instructions found here might help:

https://accc.uic.edu/answer/how-do-i-disable-outlook-auto-complete-and-clear-cache

I don't have Outlook on this computer, otherwise I'd test it out ... but I believe that CTRL+3 will open the contacts view, just as if you'd clicked the little contacts icon down in the lower left-hand corner.   But if the entries are saved in your auto-complete, removing a contact won't clear that information.

[Syene]

If that doesn't do the trick, I wonder if you could export your address book to a format readable by Excel (.csv), review and correct it there, remove the old address book, and then import the corrected version? I don't have a copy of Outlook handy but did a little googling and Microsoft seems to have decent instructions for each step on their website.