In Outlook 2003, for each Task (or any other Outlook item), you can attach a number of Contacts to it. This (I take it) is meant to allow you to identify the person or people who you might want to consult on the task. If you later want to sort your tasks by Contacts, the results are not quite what you would expect -- unlike the Categories field, it sorts by the whole Contacts field which means that seeing a list of all Tasks for a particular Contact is not (easily) possible. For instance, an item with Contacts of "John; Paul" would sort differently than "Paul; John".

Does anyone have a workaround for this? I'd like to create a special Contacts folder where each contact is actually the name of a project. Then I can attach the name of the project to all Tasks that are part of the project. I'd like to get a sorted list of tasks on all projects, but the above problem gets in the way. Note, though, that I can easily get the list of tasks for a particular project by looking at the list of activities for the project.