You mix up categories, groups and folders. What you see left in the
navigation pane are folders and groups, which both have nothing to do with
categories.

'My Contacts' is the default group under which you see contact folders. By
default there's only one folder called 'Contacts'.

Under the folders and views listing there's a button called 'Add new Group'.
Such a group is used to group your folders.

If you created a group accidentally and added folders to it, you can drag
the folders back to the 'My Contacts' group, then right click the
unnecessary group and remove it if you want to.

If you choose the 'By Category' view (listed under 'Current View'), it shows
all the contacts of just one folder grouped by categories.

As I understand you, you want all of your contacts in one folder: In order
to get any contacts back into your default contacts folder, select any other
contact folder, press ctrl+a to select all the content, then drag the
selected contacts to the 'Contacts' folder, which is the default folder.

--
Best regards
Michael Bauer - MVP Outlook

: Outlook Categories? Category Manager Is Your Tool
: VBOffice Reporter for Data Analysis & Reporting
: http://www.vboffice.net/product.html?pub=6&lang=en


Am Fri, 9 Oct 2009 15:54:38 -0700 (PDT) schrieb bullseyebill:

Ok, I reset the view and it still doesn't seem to work. It seems to
ignore categories completely. Under My Contacts I have the following
contacts categories. Contacts, Business, Doctors, Dogs & Shooting,
Personal, Work, and Work - Previous. I am currently in the contacts
category which I'm assuming means that this is for everything not
assigned a category as there are no records in this category and if I
go to the category icon, "Contacts" is not the category I can assign
something to. I create a new contact and before I save it I assign it
to the category doctors. I save it and then click to view the
contacts in doctors and my new record is not there. If I go back to
"contacts" the new contact is sitting there. If I open it, it has the
doctors category on it but it will not display in that category. If I
go to the doctors category and create a new contact and assign it to a
category dogs & shooting. It still sits in the doctors category and
is not in the dogs & shooting category.

Should I delete all of the categories and reassign everything or is
there some setting that ignores all categories?

Cindy