Looking up contact information in act is one of the most fundamental tasks in act that you will do on a regular basis.

For example, if you are looking for contact information on John Smith you could look him up by his first name or his last name. You could also do a lookup for all contacts whose first name begins with the J and then narrow your list to John Smith upon completing that lookup.  To start a lookup all you have to do is click on the lookup option on the toolbar or you can simply right-click in the field of your choice.  So for example, if you were looking up a city you can right-click on the city field and start your search from there. Fundamentally, this is the most simple and common way to search in act.

Act Lookup’s are simple and easy to use

For the sake of our discussion let’s assume you have more than one John Smith in your act database. In fact, let’s assume there were 100 John Smith’s in your database. After you do your initial lookup of John Smith you can then narrow that lookup down based on any criteria within act that you desire. For example, you can narrow down the initial lookup to only the John Smith’s that live in Boston.

When should you use groups?

If you do complex lookups on a regular basis then it is worth learning how to create groups. However, groups are discussion for another day.

When should you use complex queries?

You can create complex queries and act that search for a lot of detailed information all at the same time. In fact, you can create a query and have contacts saved to a group automatically via group membership rules.

I’m mentioning groups in queries only so you know that you have options if you are doing complex searches on a regular basis. The purpose of this tutorial is only to make you aware of how to do a simple look up and I will create more tutorials in the future to deal with complex lookups.

Here are some simple steps to maximize and simplify the way you look-up contacts in ACT.

Always remember if you need assistance you can contact me at 781-728-9777. Tony Holowitz.

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