We just said that if you haven't switched from the Personal Address Book to Contacts, now's the time. If you still need a little convincing, here are a few more reasons why a switch to Contacts is a good idea.

Beyond the fact that you'll have one fewer list to keep track of, Contacts are more fully integrated into Outlook than entries in the Personal Address Book. For example, take a look at what you can do on the Actions menu in Outlook when you’re working with Contacts. In addition, with Contacts you can:

• Quickly create a new contact by right-clicking an e-mail address.
• Include personal information such as a birthday or anniversary date. In Outlook 2003, you can even include a picture of a contact.
• Make use of Outlook organizational features such as categories and follow-up flags.
• Create vCards so that you can easily send contact information over the Internet.
• Quickly switch views to show phone numbers or to see all contacts at a certain company.

Finally, if you use different languages in Outlook, you should be aware that Contacts are Unicode compliant, while entries in a Personal Address Book are not.

For information about how to convert your Personal Address Book to Contacts, see the article Convert your Personal Address Book to a Contacts folder.