If you’re working on a deadline, you want to get all the work done as efficiently as possible while beating the clock. To achieve maximum output while ticking all the boxes, you need every little productivity hack you can get your hands on. This way, you’ll be able to scale hurdles and navigate messy workflows much faster.

While time management services like Traqq can inject that sense of urgency to help you complete your tasks on time, having more productivity-boosting tools at your disposal can raise your game to the next level.

Even simple tasks, like working on a Word document, become much more interesting when you learn all the little tricks and tips that can speed up things.

Let’s take inserting contact information into a Word document as an example: you don’t have to launch the Outlook app to get the contact details of the person you wish to email. You can get what you need without leaving Microsoft Word.

While this, by itself, doesn’t sound like much of a discovery, it is one of the little things that, when combined, can save you a great deal of time.

In this article, we explain how to pull contact information directly from Outlook to Word. If you happen to be using another mail client on Microsoft Exchange, you can pull contact information directly from that mail client as well.

How to copy Outlook contacts into a Word document

Despite what this section’s heading says, you’re not really copying contacts from Outlook to Word. Rather, the option, when configured, lets you quickly insert a client’s contact info into the selected place in your Word document.

Using this option saves you the couple of minutes you might otherwise need to launch Outlook and search for the contact information you need. Instead, the information is pulled directly, speeding up your work.

Moreover, with this option, you can insert Outlook contacts into Word without Mail Merge. The Mail Merge feature in Word is mainly designed for bulk emails and letters. If you only need a few contact details at a time, using the Address Book command in Word is arguably neater.

The steps needed to add Address Book to the Quick Access Toolbar in MS Word are outlined below:

  1. Launch Microsoft Word and select a blank document.
  2. Click the Customize QUICK Access Toolbar downward-facing arrow.
  3. Select More Commands from the context menu.
  4. Click the button under “Choose commands from” and select “Commands not in the ribbon”.
  5. Select Address Book and click the Add button.
  6. Click OK to add Address Book to the Quick Access Toolbar.

To follow the above steps, you obviously have to open Microsoft Word first. Then choose a blank document to begin the process.

The next step is to click the Customize Quick Access Toolbar arrow in the top left corner of the MS Word window. Doing so brings up the Customize Quick Access Toolbar context menu, from which the More Commands option should be selected.

When the Word Options window shows up, make sure that the Quick Access Toolbar tab is selected. Next, click the button directly below “Choose commands from” and select “Commands not in the ribbon”.

Now find the Address Book entry on the list, select it, and click the Add button to include it in the list of options on the Quick Access Toolbar on the right.

Click OK to finish things up. You will notice that the Address Book option has been added to the Quick Access menu at the top of the blank document. Hovering the cursor over the option will display its label, Insert Address, along with the description “Open the Address Book to look for names, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses”.

When you want to add a contact from an Outlook address book, simply click the Address Book icon, select the contact you’d like to add, and click the OK button.

While you’re having lots of fun with this trick, don’t forget to fine-tune your PC for the best performance. With a PC that isn’t optimized, using extra features in Word starts to make the app noticeably slower. You can try optimizing your PC yourself or pass the baton to Auslogics BoostSpeed, which is a tool specifically designed to turbo-charge slow and unstable PCs, improve the management of computer resources, and boost overall performance.

Now that you’ve discovered how to insert an Outlook contact into a Word document, go ahead and save yourself lots of time with this feature!