If we want to create a custom form, the first thing we need to do is decide what type of form we want to customize. Do you need to add a few fields to your contacts? Or do you want to add some fields to new appointments? Once we’ve made that choice, click the Tools menu on the main Outlook screen and click Design a Form. You’ll see this window pop up:

 

 

You can click the drop-down next to Look In to choose another location, but for most purposes the Standard Forms Library is where you want to be. (This is where Outlook stores all its forms by default.) You can click any of these forms to customize them. You can also click the Advanced button in the bottom right hand corner to see a description of the selected form.

 

Once you’ve chosen a form to design, click Open. The screen you will see will mostly look like the regular form you use to enter data, but there will be some changes. Here’s a sample of the contacts form in design view:

 

 

You’ll see the same thing for any form you open in design view: the basic form with added tools to help you customize it. Here’s what the tasks form looks like in design view:

 

 

The easiest way to customize any form is to modify or delete existing fields. Let’s use the contacts folder as an example.

 

 

Do you see how Web page address has a box around it in the example above? When a field is selected like that, you can hit the delete key on your keyboard. You can also move it around by dragging and dropping it. Or, you can click in the text to edit it. You can do this with any of the fields on the general tab. The other Outlook-defined tabs (like details, activities, certificates, etc) cannot be edited in this way. You can tell if a tab can’t be edited if it doesn’t have the grid-like background:

 

 

Unfortunately, with most other forms you cannot edit the general tab; you can only add fields to the user-defined tabs (P.2, P.3, and P.4). Let’s take a look at the P.2 tab in the contacts form:

 

 

This gives you a blank slate to work with so you can make a tab all your own! To customize these tabs, we need to use the field chooser.

 

The field chooser is the box on the right hand side of the screen. As you might guess, it allows us to pick what fields we want to add to our form. Let’s take a look at the menu options in the field chooser; you can see it in the picture on the right. You can use the drop-down menu to choose either a certain category of fields (like phone number fields) or a certain set of fields (like all fields available to contacts). Once you’ve got the list up, just drag and drop the field from the list to the contacts form.

 

Here’s an example:

 

 

You can drag and drop fields anywhere there’s a grid; we could even do it on the general tab in this example. Fields act the same as the text boxes we looked at before: you can select them to delete them or move them, or you can click in them to change the text. So you can use either method, or a combination of both methods, to customize your form.