Kurt Shintaku's Blog

If you’re like me you prefer the old style Outlook contact dialog box over the new style.  The old-style (left) presented a concise interface that made the best use of space on the screen & didn’t require scrolling.  And it remained on the screen by default if you left the dialog, versus disappearing.  And even though the new-style is more powerful in displaying things like Source contact info from different sources, if you dwell primarily in an Active Directory/Exchange environment, the old way might be preferable to you too.

It turns out there’s a registry fix to force the old style Contacts dialog box:  (You’ll need to create both the Key and the Value in the registry through REGEDIT.EXE)

• Key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Contactcard
• Value name: turnonlegacygaldialog
• Value type: REG_DWORD
• Value: 1

Restart Outlook and you’ll find that every time you double click on a contact, the old-style Contact window appears.

Alternatively you can cut & paste the following into a text file called Retrocontactcard.reg, then double click it to have it added to your registry:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Contactcard]
"turnonlegacygaldialog"=dword:00000001