One practice that’s common across virtually all businesses is the exchange of business cards. Microsoft chose to honor that common practice by adding electronic business cards to Outlook 2007. This brings them in line with most other modern email and contact management products.. Even better, Outlook’s electronic business cards use the industry standard vCard (.vcf) format making it simple to exchange cards with other people through email.

That said, please be aware that while Outlook makes it easy to work with electronic business cards, designing quality cards is a whole different story, and the province of the corporate marketing folks. This puts the art of designing quality electronic business cards outside the scope of an article on Outlook. What we’ll do is talk only about the mechanics of creating electronic business cards here. It’ll be up to you to come up with a actual look and layout of your cards.

How to Create an Electronic Business Card

As soon as you create a new contact, Outlook will automatically create a very basic electronic business card to go with it. These cards are nothing more than lists of the basic contact information (name, address, and so on) for that contact, along with a copy of the contact’s picture (if you have one). The procedure that follows is a high-level view of the steps necessary to create better cards to that replace these basic default ones.

To create an electronic business card for any given contact, follow these high-level steps:

1. Open the contact you want to work on. You’ll see the current version of the card on the right side of the contact window.
2. Right-click the current electronic business card. In the shortcut menu that appears, click Edit Business Card to open the Edit Business Card dialog box.
3. You’ll see numerous options and controls for editing the business card. Fortunately, Microsoft has simplified things by including an image of the business card here. That image changes its appearance as you make changes to the controls in this dialog box. That means you can see the results of each change right away. That also means you can undo changes you don’t like and allows you to freely experiment with different possibilities.
4. Once you have selected and formatted the fields you want to appear on the card, move over to the top of the Card Design section and work your way down each control, experimenting with different settings until you get a design that you like. If you have a particular picture you want to include on the card stored on your computer, click the Image button and insert it. Click Background to apply a background color to the card.
5. Repeat the previous two steps in any order to refine and tweak your card design until it’s exactly the way you want it. Click OK when done.

Using Your Electronic Business Card

Your new business card design will now be visible in Business Card view and when you attach your electronic business card to messages you send. To attach your electronic business card to a message, first position the cursor in the message at the location where you want the business card to appear. Then go to the Include section of the ribbon and click Insert Business Card. The card appears at the location of the cursor in the body of the message and is attached (in .VCF format) to the message as well.

Learning how to design and work with electronic business cards is just one of the topics covered in the fourth lesson of the 6-week online course, Introduction to Outlook 2007. If strengthening your Outlook 2007 skills in this time of uncertain job prospects makes sense to you, and you like the idea of a structured class with the ability to interact with your instructor, I strongly suggest you visit http://IntroToOutlook2007.info to learn more.

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