Here are the steps to have your Outlook Address Book open your contacts by default. You can also use these steps to choose any other address list you may have connected to Outlook. This is particularly useful when Outlook has an Exchange account as it defaults to the Global Address List.

• Outlook 2016 Default Contact List
• Outlook 2016 Default Address Book
• Default Address Book In Outlook
• Change Default Address Book In Outlook 365

Outlook 2016 Default Contact List

• How to change the default Address Book in Outlook 2016 This option controls which address book you see when you open the Address Book (via clicking Ctrl+Shift+B) and when you click the To, Cc, or Bcc buttons when composing e-mails. To change the default Address Book, do the following: 1. Open the outlook client on your desktop, click Ctrl+Shift.
• Mar 16, 2018.

Jun 17, 2019.

1. From the Home Tab on the Outlook Ribbon click on Address Book
   
2. Now the Address Book is Open click on Tools
3. Click on Options
4. Click on the drop down under “When opening the address book, show this address list first:
   
5. Choose the Contacts option and click on OK
6. If you like you can also click on the radio button which says “Start with contact folders” under “When sending email, check address lists in this order” if you wish Outlook to check your contacts folder first when searching for an email address if required.

Applies to: Outlook 2016, Outlook 2013, Outlook 2010

This is a known bug in the Exchange 2016 which may cause an oh my god situation.

After installing Exchange 2016 in the environment you will find out the below OAB name when you run the following command

Get-OfflineAddressBook

Now you would wonder why it is showing Exchange 2013 OAB name. Did you mistakenly install Exchange 2013? This is one of the OMG situation because you saw the warning that you can’t install Exchange 2013 any more while updating active directory and Exchange 2013 is there. Something wrong with Schema update or did you mess up the infrastructure.

Nothing to worry. You can verify the exchange version by running the following command

Get-ExchangeServer fl name,admindisplayversion

I could you not answer myself here and wrote to the product group.

Brian Day from Microsoft Exchange product group has confirmed that there is no issue and it is just a wrong display name of the OAB.

Microsoft should be fixing it in the future Cumulative Updates.

“Default Offline Address List (Ex2013)” is actually Exchange 2016 Offline Address Book and not an Exchange 2013 Offline Address book in a non-Exchange 2013 infrastructure.

Run the following command to fix it.

set-OfflineAddressBook “Default Offline Address List (Ex2013)” -name “Default Offline Address List (Ex2016)”

Outlook 2016 Default Address Book

So either wait for cumulative update or run the above mentioned command and fix it.

Prabhat Nigam

Default Address Book In Outlook

Microsoft MVP Exchange Server

Change Default Address Book In Outlook 365

Team@MSExchangeGuru