A phone book is a simple repository of all of your contacts and their phone numbers. With the help of tools like the Office 365 suite and Microsoft Excel, in particular, creating one is very simple and can be done in a matter of minutes. This is very beneficial if you require a digital spot where you can access all your contacts easily and efficiently, which is why we’ve decided to show you exactly how you can create a phonebook using Microsoft Excel!
What is a phone book?
Similar to telephone directories from back in the day, phone books today serve as digital repositories of a person’s contacts and their contact numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses, and in some cases, much more! Reasons for owning a phonebook can vary from something as simple as sending yearly Christmas cards to business reasons and outreach! For these reasons, many professionals consider having a phone book on hand invaluable to their workflow and efficiency, making it very important in the 21st century.
How do I create a phone book with Microsoft Excel?
Given its importance, one might assume that maintaining a digital phone book might be a tiresome enterprise. That, however, isn’t further from the truth – With the convenience of Microsoft Excel, a phone book can be created, managed, saved, shared and updated from within the comfort of your home. To do so, follow these simple steps;
- Open Microsoft Excel. Once it’s loaded up and you’ve named the file, simply click and select all of the cells you need for your phone book. Usually, this entails 4-5 columns and a high number of rows. For getting started, we suggest working with 50 or 100, as you can always add more later.
- Then, with your rows and column selected, click on the ‘Insert’ button. This will generate another box of options, under which you should click ‘Table.’ This, in turn, will sort your rows and columns, which are known as cells in Excel, into categories.
- Now, you have an interactive table in Excel. The aesthetics of the table can be customized, but for the purposes of this article, we’re going to stick to the bare-bones phone book. Select the topmost columns and name them as you please. (Typically, this goes from Name to Phone Number, with Address occupying the middle cell.)
- Now, you can start filling in the data. Click under the ‘Name’ tab and start inputting data. Simply press the ‘Tab’ key on your keyboard to navigate between cells and press Ctrl + S to save your excel sheet.
Free Templates
That’s just about everything you need to know to create a simple, yet functional phonebook in Microsoft Excel. If you wish to personalize it more, you can seek out a number of templates, such as our templates here! These can be used as-is or can be modified to better suit your needs, so if you’re hesitant to get your hands dirty, we highly recommend adopting one of our premade templates to make your life that much easier!
