Outlook 2013: Sorting People in Contact Group

[staciann]

Hi. We have 30-40 contact groups within Outlook. We just switched to O365. All of the people who were previously part of a contact group are listed in the name field as "Last, First" (the File As field). We noticed since we switched to O365, any time we add someone to a group (whether a new contact or previously existing contact), it is formatting their name in the name field as "First Last (email@address.com)" (the Email Display As field). It is impossible to sort through these groups when names are showing up in different formats. See example:

Example Group 1
Name..............................................Email

Bell, Alan.........................................abourne@abc.com
Brown, Steve...................................sbrown@abc.com
Carr, Mike........................................mcarr@abc.com
Kristin Davis (kdavis@abc.com)........ kdavis@abc.com
Lee, Johnathon............................... jlee@abc.com
Matt Smith (msmith@abc.com).........msmith@abc.com

How can we make them all show up in the same format? (preferably by "File As")

Thanks for the help!



Staci

Currently using Windows 7, Microsoft Office 2013, Crystal Reports 2013, Visual Studio 2010 & 2008, SharePoint 2013 (on prem), MS Dynamics CRM 2013 (online), MS Dynamics SL Version 7.0, Adobe CS5

 

[madonnac]

Unfortunately, I only have 2010 and 2013 to check this, but there should be a proofing option, where you have an Autocorrect section. This should allow you to disable the autoformat of name and email address.

As to the name/email fixing, this horrible looking formula will try to fix the data

Note it uses the first space, and the bracket to detect the parts of the names, so you will still have to do a sanity check afterwards.

=IF(ISERROR(FIND("(",A2)),A2,MID(A2,FIND(" ",A2)+1,FIND("(",A2)-FIND(" ",A2)-2)&", "&LEFT(A2,FIND(" ",A2)-1))

First it looks to see if the bracket is there, if not, it doesn't change anything.
If the bracket is found, it takes everything from the first space to the bracket as the last name, puts a comma after it, then takes everything from the start to the first space, and puts that next, to create a Lastname, Firstname

Note that this will mess up on names like John Q. Public (it will become Q. Public, John) and Maria von Trapp (which will become von Trapp, Maria - I have no idea if that is correct or not)