Have you ever received an Outlook 2016 contact group from someone and weren’t sure how to handle saving it into your contacts so that you could use it? I know that I have, and others I’ve worked with have as well. You would think it would be as simple as opening the group (which usually arrives as an attachment in an email) and saving it. In fact, as this screenshot shows, “Save & Close” is one of the options available to you.
But the key here is at the top, with the red arrow pointing at it. It’s the dreaded “Read-Only” message, hiding in plain site like malware hidden in a steganography file. What that tells us is that, no matter how many times we click the “Save & Close” button — over and over and over again, we’ll never save that contact group into our contacts.
So, how do we get around this? Well, there may be multiple ways around this, but for me, the simplest way for me is this.
- Open the message up in it’s own window. So, when you do this, you’ll have one window with your main Outlook program running, and another window with the mail message that contains the contact group.
- In the main Outlook 2016 window, click on your contacts.
- Switch back to the mail message with the contact group, and click and drag the attachment to your contacts in the main Outlook window. The contact group will be created in your contacts, and all of the names and their email addresses will be there.
So there you have it, a simple way to add a contact group from someone else into your Outlook 2016 contacts.
NOTE: Another option for doing the same thing is to drag the contact group directly to the contact icon.