Monday, February 28, 2011

Hiding Contacts in Skype


As a further aid to organizing your contacts list, you can shorten it by choosing to hide users who are offline, or users who are not sharing their contact details with you, or both kinds of users. To hide contacts, go to Skype: View: Hide Contacts That Are, and put a check mark against Offline or Not Sharing Details. This is a simple, quick, and effective way to trim the length of your contacts list.

Managing Group Contacts in Skype

You can group your contacts lists into various categories only if you have enabled Show Contact Groups. To enable contact grouping, go to Skype: View and put a check mark against Show Contact Groups. Contact grouping adds a group-management bar to the top of the panel displayed when you click on the Contacts tab, as shown in the following figure.
Using the contact groups bar you can create new groups and selectively display groups of contacts in your contacts list. To create a new group click on the small round button with a “+” on it, and to selectively display groups simply click on the small round button with a “>>“ on it; both buttons can be found on the far right of the contact groups bar. In the case of the previous figure, groups named “People and Friends” and “Skype Testing” are used. However, you are free to choose how many groups you want, and how they are named.
In addition to filtering and organizing your contacts list, another useful feature of contact groups is that you can carry out group actions on them. By selecting a group and right-clicking on it, you can then use the popup menu that appears to carry out actions for all the contacts in that group: Start Conference Call, Start Group Chat, Send File to Group, Send Contacts to Group, and Send Group which sends only those contacts in that group to a list of named Skype users. Also, using this popup menu, you can Rename and Remove existing groups. In short, contact groups are a great way to organize your contacts list and to carry out actions for a group that would otherwise be tedious and cumbersome.

Removing contacts in Skype

To remove an entry from your contacts list, right-click on that entry, and from the popup menu that appears choose Remove From Contacts. It’s as simple as that!