The exchange of business cards is a time-honored ritual in the world of business. Starting with Outlook 2007, Microsoft aligned itself with that tradition (and with other email products) by adding simple, user-friendly support for electronic business cards. 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. That side of things is clearly out of 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 design you are proud of.

Creating Your Own Electronic Business Card

As soon as you create a new contact, Outlook automatically creates a very basic electronic business card for it. These cards are nothing more than lists of the basic information you entered for that contact, such as their name and address, along with whatever picture, if any, you have assigned to that contact. What follows is a high-level view of the steps necessary to create better cards to that replace the plain and frankly dull default ones.

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

1. Open the contact you’re going to design a new card for. You’ll see the current version of the card on the right side of the contact window.
2. Right-click the current version of the 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 modifying and controlling every aspect of the business card. Fortunately, Microsoft has simplified things by including an image of the business card here. That image changes as you use the controls in this dialog box. This allows you to see the results of each change right away. That also means you can easily undo changes you don’t like and freely experiment with all the design possibilities.
4. Once you’ve finalized what information you want visible on the card, move over to the top of the Card Design section and work your way down. Experiment with the settings to find a design you like, or follow the directions from corporate to give your card the approved look. 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 you’re done designing.

Working with Your Own Electronic Business Card

Your new business card design will now be visible in Business Card view and whenever you attach it to a message you’re working on. 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 click Insert Business Card in the Include section of the ribbon while you’re editing the message. The card appears at the location of the cursor in the body of the message. The card is also attached to the message in .VCF format so the recipient can easily save it.

Watch the video related to Business Cards

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Help answer the question about Business Cards

How can I print multiple business cards on one page?
I was using microsoft publisher 2003 to make business cards. I have Avery paper where I can print ten cards on one sheet. But I don't want the same ten cards. They're all different. How would I set that up?

About Author

Bill Mann -
About the Author:

Learning how to design and work with electronic business cards is just one of the subjects 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, I urge you to visit http://IntroToOutlook2007.info to see if the course is available through a school near you.

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