Black On Stuff

Yesterday I installed Office 2010 beta on my laptop and started using Outlook right away. Some new features caught my attention:

- the way to install it through Click-to-Run streaming technology, that is you just download 2 MB and start using it right away, the programs will get downloaded in background but you’re able to use most of the interface functionality
- the “quick steps” section in Outlook where various multi-step actions can be added and customized (like moving the email to a specified folder)
- a better way to organize conversations (Seamonkey has it for years now)

But when I tried to make a phone call on my iPhone, I noticed a lot of strange contacts (like hundreds of them) that I didn’t had before in my address book (I sync my phone Contacts list with the office Exchange server). All of them organized in a folder Suggested Contacts. I linked this event with the Office installation and there it was: a nice folder with various contacts Outlook extracted from all my emails. But since I don’t receive one or two emails per day, but thousands, I just needed to disable the collection or at least the syncronization of this folder with the iPhone. I don’t know a way not to sync a certain address book folder, but I found out how to disable collecting such data:

Access the File tab and then the Options on the left …

… then the Contacts group and uncheck the “Automatically create Outlook contacts for recipients that do not belong to an Outlook Address Book”. After that, just delete all the harvested contacts in the Suggested Contacts folder and your iPhone will automatically update with just the contacts you’ve added.