Email Q: How To Import the Address Book?

Factual Questions
1

I am trying to import an address book into MS Outlook. The address book was exported from MS Outlook Express into an Excel file. Specifically, it is a “MS Excel Comma Separated Values” file. This seemed to have parsed the data such that each entry per field is within its own cell. For example, a field would be a last name, first name, etc…

However, when I go to “browse” during the import process, the file won’t even appear (even though my path is correct)! So, I went into Excel and I saved the file as a normal, Excel spreadsheet. (I am using Excel 2002. There doesn’t appear to be a version number.) Anyhow, after creating this file, and I go to browse, the file shows up, but! When I tell it to import it, I get an error message - something about I didn’t specify a range, or the data is out of range!

What does this mean, and what can I do about it? I WAG it is expecting me to pick some range of cells to import, but how? The import process doesn’t allow me to select a range!

Can anyone walk me through the process so I can import my address book? For starters, is my file saved in the correct format as an Excel Spreadsheet? Spell it out for me, son!

  • Jinx!
2

I suspect that you need to do two things:

  1. save the data in CSV format (Excel and many programs do that)
  2. the resulting file should have a .csv extension

The second requirement may be your problem, because the import won’t list the file, even though it is looking in the correct folder. Maybe you simply have to rename it.

Couple of other points - the .csv files are actually in readable text. Notepad will display the contents of these files… you will see data like “name1”,“address1”,“phone number” etc.

And check your settings in Explorer - the option “Hide file extensions for known file types” is evil and will lead to confusing problems (like not knowing if a .csv file has a .csv extension)

Hope this is your problem and this advice gets you to where you want to go!