ARCHIVED: In Outlook, what are the advantages and disadvantages of the different methods of organizing my Contacts?

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In Outlook, there are two different ways to organize your Contacts. You can have more than one Contacts folder, or you can organize Contacts into categories. For example, say you have many business contacts in your list:

You can create a new Contacts folder and label it "Business", and then move all the business contacts into that folder.
You can create a Category named "Business" within your current Contacts folder and organize all appropriate contacts under that.

There are advantages and disadvantages to either method:

Multiple Contacts folders

Advantages	Disadvantages
You can group different types of contacts separately in the Outlook Address Book.	You cannot take advantage of automatic journaling; that can be done only for the main Contacts folder.
You can use different forms for different types of contacts, each form specific to its folder.	You will have to create duplicate entries if a contact happens to fit two types. For example, if a contact is both a business and a personal one, you would have to create two entries and put one in each folder.
You can easily export just one set of contacts for use on another computer without having to export all contacts. For example, if you have a computer you use only for business, you can just export the business contacts and leave out the personal ones.

Multiple categories in one Contacts folder

Advantages	Disadvantages
You can combine multiple Categories into custom views, which allows many different ways of viewing your Contacts.	You cannot use Categories to select items for a Word mail merge (except in Outlook 2000).
You can enable automatic journaling for all Contacts.	You cannot directly export a particular category; you must to copy them to a separate folder first.
	You cannot use Categories to filter when using the Outlook Address Book.

You can also choose to use a combination of both methods. For example, you can have multiple Contacts folders and use categories to organize within each folder. For example, if you owned a business, you could create folders for each state you did business in, then use categories (e.g., business, personal, government, media) within each folder to organize your contacts within that state.