Organizing Your Contacts; Creating A Group - Blackberry dummies 2 Manual

Organizing Your Contacts

You've been diligent by adding your contacts to the BlackBerry Contacts app,
and your list has been growing at a pretty good clip. It now has all the con-
tact information for your business colleagues, clients, and (of course) family
and friends. In fact, you now have hundreds of contacts, and it's taking more
time to find someone.
Imagine that you've just seen an old acquaintance, and you want to greet
the person by name. You know that if you saw the name, you'd recognize it.
The trouble is that your list has 300-plus names, which would take so long
to scroll through that this acquaintance would surely come up to you in the
meantime, forcing you to hide the fact that you can't remember his name.
(How embarrassing.) In this scenario, the tried-and-true Find feature wouldn't
be much help. What you need is a smaller pool of names to search through.
This isn't rocket science. You'll want to do one of the following or both:
✓ Organize your contacts into groups. Using groups (as every kinder-
garten teacher could tell you) is a way to arrange something (in your
case, contacts) to make them more manageable. How you arrange your
groups is up to you. You should base the principle on whatever makes
sense to you and fits the group you set up. For example, you can place
all your customer contacts within a Clients group and family members in
a Family group.
✓ Set up your contacts so you can filter them. Use the Filter feature with
BlackBerry's Categories. (Categories is labeling your contacts to make it
easy to filter them.) The Filter feature narrows the contacts list to such
an extent that you have only to scroll down and find your contact — no
need to type search keywords, in other words.
Whether you use the Group feature, Filter feature, or both is up to you. You
find out how to use these methods in the next sections of this chapter.

Creating a group

A BlackBerry group in Contacts — as opposed to any other kind of group you
can imagine — is just a simple category. In other words, when you create a
group, you arrange your contacts into subsets without affecting the contact
entries themselves. In Contacts itself, a group shows up in the contacts list
just like any other contact. The only wrinkle here is that when you select the
group, the contacts associated with that group — and only the contacts asso-
ciated with that group — appear onscreen.
Chapter 4: Remembering and Locating Your Acquaintances
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