Sort Microsoft Outlook Contacts By Date Created

Posted by r0nwilliams on

Have you ever added someone to Microsoft Exchange sync’d mobile device, then forgotten their name?  BUT you know a general time period of when you added the contact?

Well, I have, and never knew how to find the “created on” attribute… but i guess I never looked very hard.  But tonight I was really feeling frisky and decided to look at all the attributes on an item in Outlook.  There’s a whole bunch of attributes that you don’t normally see, which always kinda gets me interested…   Here’s how to sort your contacts by their creation date, showing the day that you added them to your phonebook or contact list:

In Outlook 2010:

  1. Click on the contacts view in Outlook
  2. Click the View Tab in the Ribbon
  3. Click Change View>List
  4. Click View Settings
  5. Click Columns
  6. From the pulldown menu choose “All Post Views”
  7. Hilite “Created” in the list
  8. Click “Add ->”
  9. If you want, put the Created as the first in the list
  10. Click OK>OK
  11. Sort at leisure!

In Outlook 2003:

  1. Open your contacts view in Outlook
  2. Go to View>Arrange By>Current View>Phone List
  3. Go to View>Arrange By>Current View>Customize Current View
  4. Click Fields
  5. From the pulldown menu, select All Post Fields
  6. Hilite “Created” in the list
  7. Click “Add ->”
  8. Click OK>OK
  9. Check out your new “Created” column in the view. BOOM
  10. Click the Column header to sort by date.

In outlook 2007, it’s probably really similar to OL2010

27 responses to “Sort Microsoft Outlook Contacts By Date Created”

  1. Ron – You ARE the man!!!!!! There are a lot of articles/blogs etc about this but yours is the clearest and precise solution to this sorting by Created Date!!!
    THANK YOU – THANK YOU
    Have a great Holiday 🙂

    Reply

  4. Dear Ron,
    it works very well .. but i need a solution to this :
    1-i had X number of contacts on my computer
    2-after exporting the contacts i formatted the computer and configured outlook 2007 and put these X contacts on it
    3-the contacts creation date showed that they were created all in the same date (the date i put the contacts on my new outlook)

    how can i get back the real creation date of each contact??

    thank you

    Reply

    • Hi Abed: you would have to go back to the original data source for that information, if it still exists. It doesnt sound like you imported the contact creation date into outlook, so there would not be a way, within Outlook, to identify that information.

      Reply

      • Dear Ron,

        Thanks for the idea of sorting by date.
        However, when exporting the file into Excel, I can´t find the field “Created” in the list. Is that true?
        thanks
        Pat

  7. Thank you so Much!! You just saved me hours of work, trying to figure out who needed to be added to the Christmas Card List! THANK YOU!!!

    Reply

  10. This was exactly what I was looking for. I’m trying to track how many new contacts I add each week to see how effective my networking and referrals are. So I like to sort them by create date and count.

    It worked fine for Outlook 2007, too.

    Thanks,
    Matt

    Reply

  12. Thank you so much. You are awesome? I looked for hours to find any kind of answer and yours way right on and easy to follow. Can’t thank you enough. Anne

    Reply

  18. This information was a huge help. I did however find slightly different steps:

    Go to Contacts
    Click “List” in the Current View Ribbon
    Click the small arrow in the lower right corner of the View Ribbon Box
    Click “Modify”
    Click “Columns”
    Select “All Mail Fields” from the Drop-Down menu (scroll down)
    Find and highlight “Created”
    Click “Add”
    Click “Move Up” to bring the date to the top
    Click “Created to Sort the List from Newest to Oldest, or click again for the reverse

    Reply

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