By centralizing on Outlook, as many business users do, you can end up with a lot of contacts in its database. Unless you have an integrated CRM these are small bits of information that can become disconnected from your larger marketing and contact activities. Exporting them to another file such as Excel is not a problem, just use the “File” -> “Import and Export…” functions built in and follow the prompts.
But if you export and import into another application, or website like Constant Contact, and then keep adding new contacts, its becomes difficult to move them again at some future point without overwriting or creating duplicates in the destination. Outlook is not particularly helpful here, because it does not provide easy access to the “Created” or “Modified” attributes of a contact record when exporting. Here are some steps you can follow to get these newly created records into an export file.
- In Outlook, open your contact folder using the navigation bar on the left side.
- Change the Current View on the left side to “Phone List”
- By default, the columns shown do not include the ones we would want for selecting by the created or modified date. In order to get these, we must use the Field Chooser. To get this, right click in the header bar (where the column names are shown) and select “Field Chooser” from the popup list.
- A small window will open that has a list of fields. You can move this around your screen as needed and still use other functions in Outlook. By default, you will be shown “Frequently used fields”, but we need some that are only shown if we change the list. To do this, click the down arrow next to “Frequently used fields” at the top of the window, and scroll down and click on “All Contact Fields”. The window will reload with many more fields to choose from.
- Scroll down the field list, which is in alphabetical order by name, and select “Created”.
- Click the field name and hold down the mouse button. While holding the mouse button, drag the field to the header bar above the phone list and drop the field onto the header in the location you desire. It does not matter where it is, unless it helps you.
- You should now have the “Created” column in your list, and need to sort them to order by this date. To do this, right click on the column header where the word “Created” appears (where you just dropped it), and choose “Sort Descending”. The list will show the newest records at the top.
- We will need to select the records we want to export and move them to another folder so they are readily available and self contained. To do this, you need to know the oldest record you want to export. For example, if today is December 1, and your previous export was June 1, you need all records whose Created date is after June 1. To get these records, click on the first record at the top, and then scroll the list to the last line you would want to include, in our example this would be a record created on June 2. While looking at the last record, hold down the “Shift” key and click anywhere on this oldest record. All of the records to be exported will by highlighted.
- We will next need to copy these to another folder so we can export them as one set. Click on the Edit menu at the top of the Outlook window, and choose “Copy to Folder…”.
- A new window will pop up with the folders you have now. Click on the “Contacts” folder and then click on the “New…” button to the right. A new form will pop up where you can enter a name; provide some meaningful name such as “Export Dec 1 2009”, and click “Ok”.
- Click “Ok” in the previous Window named “Copy Items” to close it and copy the records. Note that we have not modified any of the existing records.
- Now we need to export the copied records. Click on the “File” menu, and choose “Import and Export…”.
- A wizard window will open with various choices of actions to perform. Click on “Export to a file” in the list, and then click “Next>” at the bottom of the window.
- Choose “Microsoft Excel 97-2003” from the list and then click “Next>” at the bottom of the window.
- In the next window, you can select the folder you just created; click on it, and then click “Next>” at the bottom of the window.
- Provide a file name to export to, in a location you will remember. You can use the “Browse…” button to change the folder easily. Click “Next>” at the bottom of the window.
- The last window allows you to edit the fields exported (the list of fields), that is not covered here but you have that option. For our needs, just click “Finish” at the bottom of the window.
- You will see a progress window and your file will be created.
This completes the export process, and you can open and edit the Excel file as needed, or import it into another system as your requirements dictate.
We have one cleanup step, to get rid of the copied records, unless there is a reason to keep them. To do this, take the following actions.
- In the upper left corner of your Outlook window you should see a list of folders, with “Contacts” at the top. Below this will be the folder you created.
- Right click on the folder you created and choose “Delete” from the popup menu. After confirmation, the folder is deleted and you are finished.
You could use this process for any of the Outlook data columns, such as “State”, “Company”, etc. to quickly choose the records and export them without affecting any data elements.