A lot of people have two, three or more email accounts these days — often each on a different service. Saving all of them with different names can make your contact list cluttered and confusing. With Outlook 2013, you can easily merge multiple contacts for the same person so its easy to manage them. Here’s how.
Merge contacts in Outlook 2013
Open Outlook 2013 and click on People from the navigation pane at the bottom.
Select the person with whom you want to link another contact, click on the three dots right next to the edit option and select Link Contact.
Under the Link Another Contacts heading, search the name of the person you want to merge and click on it. It will merge the contacts right away and will show you both names under Linked Contacts heading.
To make sure the contacts are merged, click on the name which you selected earlier and see if it shows the merged information.
That’s it. This makes it a lot easier to get your messages to people easily without having to remember each of their addresses.
7 Comments
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Mark Lenox
Good advice if the “Link Contacts” option actually existed. It does not, at least where you say it is.
Jack
Dear Edito & Mark Lenox,
Thanks, this guide is great but it has only one flaw. Many people including me use the current view as “list”. In the beginning, please add, user should also switch his current view, on the home tab, to “people”. If he doesn’t, he won’t be able to see any three dots or edit.
Another thing is, I was mainly looking for a way to actually merge both contacts, meaning, at the end there will be only one entry on the contacts list with all the info in both merged entries.
I can copy the info manually but it’s a very exhausting operation. I still have no clue how to do it automatically.
Thank you.
Robert
Doing a contact one at a time is cumbersome. There must be a method for doing multiple contacts at a time.
Yanni
Yep, it’s Gmail. Merging duplicates is easy. Yahoo mail does it for me too(at the least the plus edition I have). Again Microsoft dropping the ball on easy things to make a great experience.
Also when I setup outlook on my work computer and laptop, they don’t intercommunicate to i.e. have on contact list. Microsoft: you need to enable people to not be bound to a specific machine location but rarther have access to all their information across sites and devices
Ravi Shetty
Try this:
1) Drag one of the contacts to a another (temporary) contacts folder
2) Drag it back in to the original “Contacts” folder.
3) Outlook will prompt you to merge and shows the fields being merged.
Greg
You rock Ravi! Dragging the contact to another folder and back worked like a charm. Thanks for the time saving tip!
Michael
Yanni is correct. Microsoft, get your act together on this!!