Microsoft outlook 2011 many questions

[novax]

Hey, i am having some very annoying problems with MICROSOFT outlook 2010,
in the last month the following has happened:



in my contacts on outlook some of them have suddenly gotten a '-' in front of the names so eg if my name was John Paul
my name is now -John Paul
and this has make the alphabetical order of my contacts all messed up, when i go into the contacts area is does not show the '-' it still says John Paul, then once i hit save and exit, suddenly its gone and its no longer got '-' but its no longer under 'J' or 'P' i don't even know where its gone unless i search for it!
also:
its deleting parts of peoples names randomly, for eg if my name was John Jack Paul

now the contact is either Jack Paul
or
John Jack
i have no idea why this has happened, i have over 6000+ contacts so its hard to keep track of which ones are broken and which ones are still normal.


ALSO

In my work whenever i send an email to a costumer we are asked to send our email to our sales team as well, so when my boss is sending an email he sends the email to, eg@example.com.au; and then he will attach our contact group sales@example.com.au
when the email is sent the outgoing email says its going to eg@example.com.au and sales@example.com.au, but when the email has sent and the recipient has gotten the email,
it says its send to eg@example.com.au and staffmember1@example.com.au and staffmember2@example.com.au
and it lists off all staff members emails,

the recipient starts to wonder why my boss is sending his email to all these random names! when in fact we are just the rest of the sales team being kept in the loop!

is there anyway that when the email is sent it can say it has been sent to the recipient and the contact groups name 'sales'

or will it always have the names of the people in the group showing up???

or is their a different way we can approach this to get the same outcome!

THANKYOU

[SpiderTech]

Novax,

I have reviewed your post and can say with confidence this is not normal behavior for an exchange service.

Several things strike me as odd. First the "-" in front of a contact name and it having issues indexing properly might indicate a problem in your systems active directory. Since all synchronization starts on the client end, all contact information is uploaded to the server then synchronized to each program /device.

The second issue sounds like a routing issue. When you send to multiple recipients, any address listed in the "TO" field will be visable in the origanal header files. I'm unsure how to resolve your distribution list from showing all of the members associated with it, but you should be able to place the DL into the CC field.

I would start by checking with your provider. Do they have a support staff to help resolve these issues?

Keep me posted.

[novax]

Thankyou for your reply SpiderTech,
The bottom issue has been resolved aka the issues with having all of our staff being seen in every email we send,

we are still sadly, having issues with the contact list, I will let you know that it is my Boss's computer and not my own. I am just trying to fix it for him,
He has let me know recently that this happened after his laptop crashed one day,
(he is running windows 7 ultimate 32 bit on 1gb of ram -_-)
so no surprises there with the crash!!
he also said that alot of the contact issues also happened after he tried to sync his HTC phone contacts with outlooks, could this be the reason??

In my previous post i said that:

"when i go into the contacts area is does not show the '-' it still says John Paul, then once i hit save and exit, suddenly its gone and its no longer got '-' but its no longer under 'J' or 'P' i don't even know where its gone unless i search for it!"

I was looking at the contacts again and realised that when i hit save and exit and the contact dissapears it actuallu goes down my contact list lower and still appears with the "-" in front of the name but just in a weirder order than it was already in.

I cannot get rid of the "-" even if i fill in every details in the contact fill out sheet,
This has only effected SOME of the contacts and not all,
it does not effect the new contacts i put in,
just about 100-200 of random old contacts


ThankYou

[SpiderTech]

Novax,

The contact issue you are experiencing is new to me. The information you have provided does suggest an indexing issue with the contacts.

Not sure if this will work, but attempt an export of all contact data from your boss's PC. Export it to a .CSV and see if the data correctly exports. This essentially will make a back up of his full contact list outside of the active directory list.

It is recommend that you import the contacts to a new test account just to validate the data is not corrupted. You can then remove the contacts from his mailbox and import the .CSV. See if this work around fixes your issue.

Hope this helps..

[novax]

SpiderTech, to great amazment i have fixed my problem!!!
I was just fiddling around with the contacts before i was about to try your theory,

when i realised that the ordering of the contacts was set up to order in a last name accending THEN a first name accending,
the only problem with that is that some contacts dont have a last name!!
therefore ms outlook was putting a (-) to tell us that where was no last name!!!

i changed the ordering so that it ordered it in "full name" and poof!
everything was fine again!!!!
amazing!

Thank you very much for your help though!!!
i still have one issue!

because my boss synced his contacts with his HTC it seems to have made doubles of some of the contacts,

do you have any idea how to get rid of the doubles without having to delete one by one?

Thank you once again

Novax

[SpiderTech]

Novax,

Thank you for the update, unfortunately removing duplicated contacts is going to be a manual task.

Here is the HTC main support site. It is possible there is alternate way to aid you.

http://www.htc.com/us/support

Best Regards,