New Outlook - creating contact list (many email addresses!)

Hi, 

So I just took over from a predecessor managing meeting invites and communications to lots of people. 

The previous person did so manually with around 200 recipients. Later I find people asking to be taken off the list. I'm trying to find a smarter way to manage this properly by creating a contact list as a distribution method. So, under "People" (for some reason there was no option for me to create a new group under Groups, the option is simply not there), I select "+ New Contact list". Under the field for "Add new email addresses" (note the plural), it seems that I can't just paste a bunch of contacts even if it is formatted in the typical Outlook way. It just pretends that one long string containing 200 people is one contact that it's searching for. 

Any suggestions on how to do this properly, so I don't find myself adding 200 people individually?

Cheers,

ST