Updating contacts after company changed name

A company I work with a lot changed its name (it actually got taken over by another company). I have quite a few contacts from that company in my Outlook.

How can I update the company name of those contacts without editing every single one manually?

You can achieve this by using the default “By Company” view and dragging and dropping your contacts into the correct company group;

  1. Change your view to “By Company” via;
    • Outlook 2003
      View-> Arrange By-> Current View-> By Company
    • Outlook 2007
      View-> Current View-> By Company
    • Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013
      tab View-> group: Arrangement-> Company
  2. Open 1 contact of the company, edit the company name and save and close the contact.
    This will auto-generate a group for that company.
  3. Now select the other contacts of that company and drag and drop them it the group of the new company name.

 
Drag and drop to create some superhero colleagues.

Note 1: A tooltip will inform you about the change that is going to happen when you drop the contact there.

Note 2: You can create a view with another “Group By” field than “Company” to update other fields. For instance, you can update the “Company main phone” field this way as well or the “Website” field.

Note 3: If you have a lot of contacts, then you can collapse all the groups as well to save you some scrolling. For this use;
View-> Expand/Collapse Groups-> Collapse All Groups