Friday, February 29, 2008

Deleting or editing Autocomplete (drop-down) entries in Outlook or Explorer

This is my favorite reason emails are not receivedan autocompleted typo!

Ever begin typing an email address or web site name and find the wrong address showing up in the drop down (Autocomplete) list? Probably from a previous typo, but how do you get rid of (delete, edit, remove or erase!) the darn thing?

So easy! Just one step:

Keep typing until the only item in the drop down list is the WRONG onethe one you want to delete. Press the Delete key on your KEYBOARD. It's gone! (Some have reported that you also need to hover over itdon't click!with your mouse.)

If you don' t have the correct item showing now is a good time to type it in, so the next time you need it it's there! If it's an email address, you'll need to send a test email; it won't be added to the drop-down/autocomplete list until you have actually typed in something that was used in a sent email.

Not the tip you needed?

There are a variety of ways to delete history and favorites/bookmarks depending on your browser and the outcome you really want.

4 comments:

  1. very helpful - thanks

    I wonder if you can help me with one other thing that annoys me about Outlook (being tempted by Thunderbird but I don't think Thunderbird is compatible with maximizer.com). It's when you sort a To or From column A-Z. It may show "Joe Bloggs" (whose e-mail is, let's say "zulu@...") in the "J" section of the list for "Joe", in the "B" section for "Bloggs" or the "Z" section for "zulu@..." - or all 3 sections! Why can't it make up its mind?? It makes it impossible to find stuff when your list is very long and it wastes time while you hunt for the e-mail you need.

    Oh, and another thing, related to your blog post. How do you make sure addresses get added to the autocomplete list? Sometimes they are in the list after I have sent an e-mail to that address and sometimes not. Is it simply whether I typed the address in or pasted it, or more random than that (he said, suspecting the latter!). I'm also never quite sure whether, using the above example, the autocomplete will be triggered by "J", "B" or "Z".

    ReplyDelete
  2. It is simply dependent on whether you have typed in an address. For sorting, check the "file as" and "display as" fields for each contact to get more control of that. And also check http://www.slipstick.com/ for great answers to Outlook questions.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousJune 30, 2009

    Superb!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

    I found that you can even just press the down arrow to get the whole list, and just hover over each unwanted entry & press delete.

    ReplyDelete