I've just been playing around with the auto-complete and I may have
uncovered how it works. It appears that one (and primary) search path is
based on the age of the record/contact. That is, whatever contact was
created first will be the first to show up as the auto-complete entry.
Example: if I were to enter a contact "Bob (work)" and then a second entry
"Bob (home)", "Bob (work)" would show up first when I start entering "Bob"
in the To field. I'm assuming this is a result of how the Address Book
(.wab) file is stored. They are probably stored like a text file with new
entries at the bottom and when OE needs to query the address list it starts
from the top down. I'm not 100% sure on this but it certainly seems like
the case. Can anyone confirm this?


Greg


GO wrote:
Hi Bruce,

Thanks for the speedy reply. I've played around with the display
names already but have had no luck as of yet. I appreciate your
other two options but neither are really practical. Prepending a '1'
or '2' in front of the contacts makes the auto-complete more awkward
to use, and going to the Address Book just adds needless steps.
Granted they both would work, but would still prefer someway to get
my original idea to work. Are there any guidelines/rules on how OE
selects an address when you start typing in the To field? As of now,
I can't see a pattern.


Bruce Hagen wrote:
Auto-Complete is a little touchy in OE. Some things you can try is to
alter the Display names. You will have to play around.

A 1-display for home, and a 2-display for work, may help. Otherwise,
I would just surest clicking the To button in front of the Address
field and select the address from there.

"GO" wrote in message
...
Hello,

I'm hoping someone here has a tip or trick to make Outlook Express'
auto complete for addresses behave a little more to my liking. For
many of my address book contacts I will have two entries for the
same person, one is their personal address and the other a work
address. It seems that regardless of what I have for the
name/display name it will always choose the work address when
auto-completing (I had originally planned on just adding a
secondary email address in the contact itself but OE makes it
difficult to extract/use the address when needed). Are there any
tips, tricks or work arounds to get OE to select the "personal"
address first?


TIA,

Greg