If you have been a Sage ACT! user for a long time, you may not be taking advantage of how the new Groups feature works. In older versions of ACT! you had to manually add and remove contacts from groups. Most people forgot to add their new contacts to existing groups and so the group memberships would be quickly out of date.

All of that has changed with the newer versions. Did you know that you can add a contact to a group based on one or more field values?

You can follow the detail instructions below this video, but live examples are included in this video:

Let’s say you want to create a group of all clients with e-mail addresses.

1. Click on the Groups slider bar at the left to go to Group Detail view.
2. Click the New icon on the toolbar (or press the [Insert] key on your keyboard).
3. Enter a name for the Group.
   
4. Click the Add/Remove Contacts… button on the Contacts tab (or the icon on the smaller toolbar at the top of the screen).
5. Click the Edit Criteria… button in the Add/Remove Contacts dialog.
6. Create a query that finds all contacts with an ID/Status of Customer (or something similar to what you use in your ACT database) AND where E-mail “Contains Data”. Click the Field Name drop-down and select ID/Status. For the Operator, select Contains. In the Value area, type the value for the first criteria. Click Add to list. For the second row of the query, select the E-mail field and choose the Operator of Contains Data. Click Add to list. Click Preview to check your results so far.
   
7. If all looks well, then click OK to save the query criteria for the group.
8. Click OK once again to save the group.

While it may take a minute or two to define the Group query criteria, it is great for helping you to keep your Group memberships up to date. As you change the ID/Status from Prospect to Customer, the contacts are automatically added to the group. If the e-mail bounces, you can remove the data from the E-mail Address field and the contact will be immediately removed from the group.

Tagged as: Criteria, Groups, Lookups