Manage profiles or identities in Outlook for Mac

If you use Outlook 2016 for Mac in more than one capacity, such as for your personal life and for work, you can set up Outlook to handle these different capacities by using profiles. A profile is associated with and stores a set of email messages, contacts, tasks, calendars, account settings, Scrapbook clips, and more.

Note: In Outlook 2011 for Mac, profiles were called identities.

The Outlook Profile Manager (previously called the Microsoft Database Utility) is installed as part of your Office installation, and it allows you to create new profiles, edit or delete profiles, and set your default profile. When you open Outlook, it always uses the default profile.

Important: If more than one person uses the same computer, Outlook profiles don't offer as much privacy as separate user accounts in the Mac OS. Outlook profiles don't offer password protection, and Spotlight searches from the Finder will locate Outlook items from all the profiles in the current user account. To learn more about how to create user accounts, visit Apple support.

Add, change, or delete a profile

From Finder, open the Applications folder.
Ctrl+click or right-click Microsoft Outlook, and then select Show Package Contents.
Open Contents > SharedSupport, and then launch Outlook Profile Manager.

Do one of the following:

Action	How to do
Create a new profile	Select the Create a new profile ( + Plus ) button, and then enter a name for the new profile.
Rename a profile	Double-click the profile, and then enter a new name for the profile.
Delete a profile	Select the profile that you want to remove, and then choose the Delete the selected profile button ( - minus )
Change the default profile	Highlight the profile that you want, access Set the default profile, and choose Set as Default. Restart Outlook for this change to take effect.

Note: The default profile selected is the profile Outlook will use until changed