Before jumping into Vista Mail and the implied adoption of Windows Contacts
consider what features of Outlook you are giving up. Vista Contacts provides
about 30 data fields, Outlook about 100. For example, Vista Contacts
provides 1 set of business contacts per contact name, Outlook has 3 or 4.
If you want to migrate contacts - here is what worked for me.
1. In your existing Outlook 2003, export your CONTACTS file to Excel.
2. Export your Vista Contact(s) to Excel. There should be at least one
contact – yours from the installation set up. The reason for this is to give
you a complete list of the field names from Vista Contacts (VC).
3. Create a new worksheet and place the column headings (field names) from
the VC export in row 1. These are the column headings you will ultimately
re-import to VC. DO not change these in any way - wording or order.
4. Use Excel to clean up the exported contacts from your current Outlook -
duplicates, missing info and so on.
5. Paste all of the Outlook data including the column headings into row 2
of the newly created worksheet. This will give you a worksheet with the VC
field names in row 1 and the Outlook field names in row 2. The Outlook
contact data will be in rows 3 and higher. Yes – there are a lot more
Outlook columns (fields) than there are VC fields.
6. Now the hard part - cut and paste the columns of Outlook data, one at a
time from the Outlook data so that the data appears under the appropriate
column heading in row 1 (VC). What you are doing here is effectively mapping
the Outlook data fields to the VC field. Since there is only about 1/3 as
many fields in VC as there are in Outlook - you will have to decide what
Outlook data to delete or move. A couple of suggestions here: If you have a
contact that has 2 home phones, for example a home and a mountain home -
create two Contacts - their normal contact (Last Name, First Name) and a 2nd
(Last Name, Mountains). This will give you a 2nd record into which you can
record their 2nd home number and it will sort next to their main number.
Another option is to put any data that doesn't fit in any other field into
the Notes field.
7. Because you need a CSV file to import into VC - you need to make sure
your contacts data does not have any commas in it - for example Philadelphia,
PA will cause a problem as CSV will think the comma is indicating a new
field. Use Excel's search and replace to replace all "," with "." or
whatever you like.
8. Once your contacts are all "clean" and you have removed the commas - use
Excel File Save As to export the data to a CSV file.
9. You're almost there - I would make one last check before importing your
CSV file of Contacts into Vista Contacts - Use Excel to open the CSV file you
just created and review it to make sure all the fields populated correctly.
10. Open Vista Contacts and use import CSV contacts to import the contacts
from the CSV file.
It took me about 3 hours to clean up 400 contacts. The import process took
less than 5 minutes.
Hope this helps someone - now on to getting my calendar & tasks into Vista.
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