Outlook Outlook 2003 Contacts & Address Book

[fje]

Hi there,


I have "upgraded" from Outlook 2002---->2003. We imported the address book from Outlook Express to 2002 and afterwards to 2003 and we also converted the .pst file to the new 2003 format. Then, we have discovered that:

1.- Entering from Tools, we have an address book with two contacts folders, one empty and the other one with all the mail contacts we imported, most of them duplicated (or triplicated), but with different information.

2.- Looking at the Outlook 2003 folders, we have a "Contacts" folder with also all the mail contacts info that we felt was the same as the one in the address book (now we have discovered it isn't ;-( ).

Then, in order to do some "clean-up", we started to delete all the duplicated entries in the "address book - contact" folder, in particular those ones that seemed not to have the correct info.

We expected to have them also deleted from the "outlook contact" folder, but surprising to us, they weren't.... Than our questions come:

a.- Why do we have the "empty folder" in the address book and can we delete it in order to avoid confusions?

b.- Which "contact list" (address book or outlook one) are we really using for our mailing sending ? is there any way we can discover and fix it?

c.- How can we have deleted the entried we delete in one of the contct list deleted in the other? In other words, how can we synchronize both "contacts lists"

Thanks for any help and best regards.

Javier

 

[fje]

Outlook 2003 Contacts & Address Book - Solved

Hi,

I feel we have solved our problem (thanks to the help of some other one answering my question in another MS-related forum) and I'm posting here what we found for the case it can be useful to other ones with similar troubles.

The main problem was a conceptual one. I read in some other forum that the "Contact Folder" and the one in the "Address Book had no relationship between tham and were totally different things.

They aren't.

You can find it changing the name of the "Contact Folder", going to its properties and changing it default name (contacts) and marking the "show it as address book" (or the similar sentence you can find in the english version. ;-)) ). This way, you will clearly find it in your address book.

Then, everything you delete in the "Contacts (or renamed) folder" is deleted in the one (with the same name).

But the address book one doesn't work the same way, it works more as a "view" of the contact folder. In fact, if you delete an entry in the address book list, it isn't deleted in the contact folder. What it does in only to erase the e-mail field of the corresponding entry in the contact folder.

Finally, the migration process we did is surely not the best one. Even we cannot re-do it again (we could lose data), the suggestion we got in the other forum and that I also feel is the best one is to save the .PST file of Outlook 2002 in a sure place, install from scratch Outlook 2003 (without any .PST file), leaving it to create a new and empty .PST file with the new format, afterwards we open the saved "2002 .PST file" and copy&paste all the needed info from the old to the new one. After the process is done succesfully we can forget about the "old 2002 .pst" file, or even better, pass that file to a CD in order to have it in the case we need it again (that we surely need the day after we delete it).

Best regards.

Javier