Outlook to Access

  • Thread starter Thread starter sopranoiam
  • Start date Start date
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sopranoiam

I'm new at Access and things are pretty much making sense. My co-workers
have many contacts in Outlook that I want to import into a master Access
database I'm setting up. There are 1000's of contacts that will eventually
be imported from various employees, with different criteria in their contact
files and I don't want to waste time when I actually do the import, so can
someone tell me an efficient way to handle this? I have alot of time,
there's no hurry in creating this database, I just want as much information
to populate as easily as possible.
 
Hi,

Sometimes the simplest brute force one step at a time approach ends up being
the most efficient - few surprises that way.

Make a list of all of the employees that you need to collect data from -
Excel is great for this kind of task - put an X in the completed column when
you have their export accomplished.

In each user's Outlook, go to the File menu, import and export..., Export to
a file, <NEXT BUTTON>, Microsoft Access, select the Contacts folder, <NEXT
BUTTON>, give it a name that identifies the user and save it to a shared
server folder you have created for this purpose. This only takes about 5
minutes per user.

Once you have your data collected, you can start appending and deduping,
until you get the master list in good shape.

Probably a good idea to collect and scrub and dedupe the data this way, but
how you deploy it - Access might not be your best way to distribute this
information. Once you have a good master contact list, assuming you have
Exchange Server available - you could create a public contacts folder with
your master list. The users get a familiar interface to the data to work
with, they can add new contacts, update phone numbers, add new comments,
etc. and with some effort on the front end, you have a self-sustaining and
self-maintaining contacts system.

I've gone this way in the past and it has worked exceptionally well. Caveat:
be sure you make regular backups and keep a long set of historical backups,
because users can get stupid now and then. You probably won't know what you
are missing, until you need it.

The tremendous advantage of this approach is that it's an easy sell, the
users appreciate having access to the most recent data and they already know
how to use the Contacts folder.

If you need to use the public folder data for marketing or other purposes
with Access - you can link to that folder or grab a fresh up to date copy of
the data any time you like.

Hope this helps,
Gordon
 
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