ACT! by Sage and Microsoft Outlook Tips and Tricks
The ACT!/Outlook integration has come a long way in the last fews years and I am pretty happy with it. There are a few tweaks I’d like, but overall it’s easy to use for both recording outgoing e-mail messages as well as selectively attaching incoming messages.
If you’re familiar with the Quick Attach feature, you know that it allows you to choose one or more messages and then click the Quick Attach button and it runs throught the process of attaching each message where it finds a matching address in the database. Somewhat of an (understandable) frustration is that you don’t have any quick indication of whether or not the sender’s e-mail address is in your ACT! database. If there is no match, the message just drops off into an imaginary bit bucket and is not attached to any record.
Here’s what I do when in doubt as to whether someone’s address is in ACT! or not:
- I select the message
- Click the “Create ACT! Activity” icon (looks like a handshake)
- If the activity window comes up and shows the sender, I know the address is in ACT! (because ACT! uses the e-mail address to make the match)
- If it shows my own record, I know that e-mail address does not exist.
You can also check by using the “Attach to ACT! Contacts” button to do this, but I find that it takes longer to load, especially if you have a large database.