I’ve been extremely frustrated at times in Microsoft Outlook when trying to get the Outlook Properties dialog (e.g. it has all the Exchange data from the GAL for the person such as their title, manager, reports, DLs they’re members of, etc.) up for a contact in Outlook. If the person is also in my contacts the Outlook Properties page is sometimes extremely tricky to get to and instead I’ll get the Contacts entry for the person.

Now, I’m so happy to have stumbled upon a way to get the right one up. When searching for the contact through the “Search address books” text box (or I think it was “Type a contact to find” in previous versions of Outlook) on the Outlook toolbar (hit F11 within Outlook and it’ll take you to it), prefixing the person’s alias with an equals sign (e.g. ‘=alias’) will bring up the Outlook Properties dialog instead of the Contacts entry.

I’m not sure how one could improve the discoverability of this feature but in the well over 10+ years I’ve been using Outlook I’m sure knowing this would have saved me a few hours of frustration. I figured I’d post about it in case it saves someone the frustration…