Custom filters for the Contact List

This week's feature is a new way to slice and dice your contact list using custom filters. Custom filters allow you to filter your contact list by different criteria of your choosing - including country, state, post code, job title, organization, email address or telephone number. You can combine multiple criteria together into one filter, and save the filters you create for easy recall later.

The best way to show this feature off is with an example. Say you wanted to create a list of all the contacts with an address in New York City for an upcoming marketing campaign in that area. First choose to create a new custom filter from the 'View' menu, as shown below in red.

Then in the 'Filter by' drop down you can choose one of the contacts fields to filter by - in this case we're going to choose the 'Contact Address City' field. This field relates to any address on file for a contact, and allows you to find matches to the city part of that address.

You can choose to find exact matches by using the equals sign in the drop down, or just find matches that contain your criteria somewhere in the field by choosing the 'contains' option in the drop down. Searching in filters is not case sensitive, so it does not matter if you type in 'New York' or 'new york' as your value. See the screenshot below for our first filter criteria.

Click the 'Add' button to the right to add this first filter criteria. Results that match will be shown below the filter box immediately.

We'll also add another filter to match those addresses that have the abbreviation for New York City - 'NYC'. You can choose to add the second filter with an 'AND' or an 'OR' - meaning that it's going to find only those contact records that match both filter criteria for an 'AND', or those records that match either one of the two filter criteria for an 'OR' - we want either criteria so we're going to choose 'OR' option in the screenshot below.

To delete a filter criteria you have just added, click the trash can icon to the right of that filter line. After you add filter criteria, Insightly will show you the resulting matches in the list below immediately, so you can build up or delete criteria and experiment until you are satisfied with the results. When you're happy with the filter, you can save it for easy access later by typing in a name and clicking the 'Save Filter' button.

We've saved our filter as 'Contacts in NYC' in the screenshot below, and it can be accessed at any time by choosing that filter from the View list. The filter will rerun itself every time so it's always up to date with the correct matching contacts.

Click on the 'Close' hyperlink to exit the filter and return to showing all your contacts. To delete a filter you have previously saved, click on the trash can icon to the right of the filter name.

Handy hints for Filters

When you run a filter, the results will be shown in lots of up to 50 results per page, but to see all matches on a single page - choose the 'All' hyperlink to the left of the alphabet letters just under the search box in the header.

Using the Contact Tags sidebar lets you choose to show contacts that match multiple tags - but each contact has to have ALL the tags you choose in the sidebar. But you can use the new Contact Filter feature to see all contacts that match either one tag OR another tag. First choose the 'Contact Tag' field in a new filter, and add a filter criteria for each tag you want, but remember to choose the 'OR' option in the drop down.

To export all contacts returned for a filter: first select or create your filter, then click on the 'All' hyperlink in the header to show all the results on one page, then click on the checkbox in the header to highlight the entire list, then finally click the 'Export' link in the blue selected items box that pops up to export your entire filtered list.


Custom filters can be a powerful way to create and save smaller contact lists within your full contact list, and we know you'll find them a powerful addition to Insightly. We'll be rolling out custom filters for the other tabs in the next few weeks too.