Outlook Hints and Tips

Exporting Contacts from Outlook 2000

Importing and exporting between Outlook 2000 and Outlook Express is not straight forward.

If all else fails, here's a technique that may succeed.

Open Outlook 2000
Select Tools|Services from the main menu
From the 'Services' tab, select the 'Add' button
Select 'Personal Address Book' from the 'Add Service to Profile' dialog box. Press 'OK'
The 'Personal Address Book' setup dialog is displayed. The default settings are likely to suffice. Press 'OK'.
Acknowledge the warning that you mus restart Outlook to effect this change.
Close and restart Outlook 2000.
Select Tools|Services from the main menu
Select the 'Addressing' tab from the 'Services' dialog. Make a note of the current settings. You may want to reset these after you have completed the procedure.
Amend the 'Show this address list first:' drop down list to 'Personal Address Book'
Amend the 'Keep personal addresses in:' drop down list to 'Personal Address Book'
Press 'OK' to close the 'Services' dialog.

Open Outlook 2000
Select Tools|Address book from the main menu
Amend the 'Show Names from the:' drop down list to 'Contacts'. All your existing contacts should be displayed.
Select all your contacts in the list, by selecting the first item, then pressing Shift-End to highlight them all.
Right click the list, or press Shift-F10.
Select 'Add to Personal Address Book' from the pop-up menu
Amend the 'Show Names from the:' drop down list to 'Personal Address Book'. All the newly copied contacts should be displayed.
Close the address book

Open Outlook Express
Select File|Import|Other Address Book from the main menu
Select 'Microsoft Exchange Personal Address Book' from the 'Address Book Import Tool' dialog.
Select 'Import'.
You may get some errors during the import. You probably want to make a separate note of each of these and manually correct them later. You can separately export each contact as a vCard. See Exporting contact as vCard
Select Tools|Export from the main menu. You should now see all your contacts.

You may like to undo the changes made to Outlook 2000 'Services' dialog by changing the address book options back to their previous settings.

The vCard format is a common text file format recognised by many email applications.

Open Outlook 2000.
Select the contacts folder
Open the contact you would like to save
Select File|Save As from the menu
Change the 'Save as type' to 'vCard Files (*.vcf)'. You may also find the 'rtf' file format usefull too.
Select a directory and filename to suit
Select 'Save'

Unfortunately you can only save one contact at a time.

Creating a local folder allows you to transfer messages, contacts, calendar to another machine.

Open Outlook 2000
Select Tools|Services from the main menu
From the 'Services' tab, select the 'Add' button
Select 'Personal Folders' from the 'Add Service to Profile' dialog box. Press 'OK'
Select a suitable directory and filename for the personal folder. Press 'OK'
Change the name to something meaningful
Select 'OK' to close the 'Services' dialog
The new folder will be visible in the folder list

You can close the folder by right clicking and selecting 'Close myFolder'

You can re-open the folder by selecting File|Open|Personal Folders (.pst) from the main menu.

You can now copy existing folders or items to this new folder.

Close the folder before transferring it to another machine.

-- Frank Dean - 01 Dec 2002