Name fields appear empty but are not

[Guest]

I have a number of contacts in my Contacts folder that represent companies
not people and therefore have no First Name or Last Name, just Company.

But somehow even though all the records appear to have empty First, Last
(and thus Full) Names, it seems there is a difference. To show this, if I
group by Last Name, there are 2 group headers that show (None), with some
company records under one and some under the other. If I drag a record from
one group to another, it does not move it.

Yet, if I filter on Last Name is empty, I get all of those records.

Is it possible that there are different states of "emptiness" (maybe some
records have an "empty" Last Name and some item's Last Name field doesn't
exist)? How can I correct this?

The reason this is important is that I have an external program that reads
Outlook items and does not recognize those contacts which appear empty but
are in the separate group.

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Yes, there are indeed different states of emptiness -- 1) never had a value
and 2) once had a value but currently doesn't.

A possible fix (you might want to back up the data first): Give one item a
dummy last name. Drag all of one (none) group's items to that last name's
group, then back to the (none) group. Repeat with the other (none) group.

Why does your external application care about what's in the Last Name field?