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I have to wonder what you need that step for. You can use the results of that equation in any other cell and if you copy-and-paste into another application, you get the value, not the equation.

It's like this: Outlook is messed up. MS has put so many quirks into that program it's ridiculous.

I have an attorney in my office who can't figure out why it is that when he's creating a new email, when he types a name into the To: field, for some of his contacts it only suggests them if he starts typing their first names, and for some their last names. Well, after much trial and error and testing on my part, I found that first it takes the nickname data from the "Display as:" field in the contact's properties. The thing I didn't know is that first it matches whatever name you put in there starting with the first letters in the text box, and it will match the email address.

So, if you have the name in there as "Last, First ([email protected])", then if you've sent that person an email before, it will match either "Las..." or "Fir..." in the To: field of a new email. However, if the Display as: field contains "First Last ([email protected])", then it will match "Fir..." but it will not match "Las..."

The problem is that the values he has in the Display as: field are all over the place in terms of formatting. So what I wanted to do was to first see how he would like to format it, just so it's consistent, and then make sure they were all correct. That's where I came up with the idea to export his contacts to Excel and find some way to populate all the fields with the correct values. There are other ways to do this within Outlook. For example, if you display the contacts in "Phone List" mode, then include the "Display as:" field as one of the columns, you can go through each contact and delete whatever is in there, then Outlook will repopulate that field with whatever format has been chosen in Tools > Options > Contact Options > Default "Full Name" Order. But when you have as many contacts as these attorneys do, that is not a valid option. I couldn't see any other, so I decided on the Excel method.
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Matt