export contacts by category

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dprawel - 15 Mar 2008 06:10 GMT

I can't find how to export only a specific category of contacts, e.g. Family,
to an Excel file. I've read all the posts and help. Custom views is fine for
print, mail merge, etc. but doesn't appear to be able to "export" what you
see in the custom views to Excel. Cut/paste is a kludge, but at least gets
the data there, if you don't mind lots of manual cleanup (only realistic if
you have only very a few contacts).

I have hundreds of contacts in dozens of categories. Many contacts have
multiple categories, e.g. Family and Holiday Card. In the end, the
File->Export function seems to be the tool MS made for this, but it only
exports ALL contacts in a folder, with no filtering (by category or anything
else it seems), other than selecting specific fields of course. I switched to
multiple folders of contacts years ago for this reason, but switched back to
a single Contacts folder with multiple categories for many reasons probably
well known to all.

And when I File->Export the categories (as one of the specific fields), I
get all categories in a single Excel column - NOT SORTABLE.

Any ideas?

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Michael Bauer [MVP - Outlook] - 15 Mar 2008 07:40 GMT

Create another contact folder to which you *copy* the contacts of the
category you want to export. Then export that folder. After that you can
delete the folder with its content.

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Best regards
Michael Bauer - MVP Outlook
Use Outlook Categories? This is Your Tool:
<http://www.vboffice.net/product.html?id=2006063&cmd=detail&lang=en&pub=6>

Am Fri, 14 Mar 2008 22:10:00 -0700 schrieb dprawel:

> I can't find how to export only a specific category of contacts, e.g. Family,
> to an Excel file. I've read all the posts and help. Custom views is fine for
[quoted text clipped - 16 lines]
>
> Any ideas?

Reply to this Message

Roady [MVP] - 15 Mar 2008 11:43 GMT

In addition to Michael's answer;

Method 1:
Customize your view to what you want it exactly to be and then
select-all/copy/paste it to Excel. No cleanup needed.

Method 2:
Export everything to Excel and then use the filter function in Excel to only
display items containing the word (category) of your choice.

Signature

Robert Sparnaaij [MVP-Outlook]
Coauthor, Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003
http://www.howto-outlook.com/
Outlook FAQ, HowTo, Downloads, Add-Ins and more

http://www.msoutlook.info/
Real World Questions, Real World Answers

-----

> I can't find how to export only a specific category of contacts, e.g.
> Family,
[quoted text clipped - 23 lines]
>
> Any ideas?

Reply to this Message

Michael Bauer [MVP - Outlook] - 16 Mar 2008 08:34 GMT

Good catch, Robert. I like #2.

Signature

Best regards
Michael Bauer - MVP Outlook
Use Outlook Categories? This is Your Tool:
<http://www.vboffice.net/product.html?id=2006063&cmd=detail&lang=en&pub=6>

Am Sat, 15 Mar 2008 11:43:30 +0100 schrieb Roady [MVP]:

> In addition to Michael's answer;
>
[quoted text clipped - 5 lines]
> Export everything to Excel and then use the filter function in Excel to only
> display items containing the word (category) of your choice.

Reply to this Message

Roady [MVP] - 16 Mar 2008 23:44 GMT

Thanks! It's funny to see how many different solutions we came up with in
this thread :-)

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> Good catch, Robert. I like #2.
>
[quoted text clipped - 8 lines]
> only
>> display items containing the word (category) of your choice.

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dprawel - 24 Mar 2008 13:41 GMT

Copy/paste doesn't do the job, unless I'm missing your suggestion. As I
explained in my post, when you create a view you get rows, each with a field,
including field name, such as the following:
Full Name: Kevin xxxxx
Job Title: Office of xxxxxx
Company: Dept of xxxxxx
Bus: (703) abc-defg
Mobile: (410) abc-defg
E-mail: Kevin.xxxx.yyyyy@abcd.com
Categories: CIC speaker, End User, Interop

I have hundreds of these, most with multiple categories. When I paste I get
exactly this info, in rows in Excel. It takes a lot of manual transposing and
cleaning up to get it in column format to sort and arrange many at once. I
need to remove the field names, and multiple categories are semi-colon
separated but are contained in the same cell so they can't be sorted on.

Export to Excel and filter: Good idea. Thanks. For the sake of anyone
reading this (it's a popular topic!) "Find & Select:" in Excel gives
highlighted occurrences of the category fields I want, but then to get only
all the records which contain the particular category of interest I used
Filter->Text Filter->contains…

In the end, what a kludge all this is!! If only the export function could
export a category. I can't imagine I'm the only person who needs to do this.
From reading the many related posts over the years in these forums, this is
definitely an area that needs improvement. Seems an easy request. I will
suggest an enhancement.

Thanks Michael. And thanks Robert for your thoughtful ideas. Cheers.

> Thanks! It's funny to see how many different solutions we came up with in
> this thread :-)
[quoted text clipped - 11 lines]
> > only
> >> display items containing the word (category) of your choice.

Reply to this Message

Michal [Outlook MVP] - 16 Mar 2008 11:59 GMT

Hi,

You can use CodeTwo Outlook Export freeware to do that. Group your view "by
category", then select category groups you want to export and click the
"Outlook Export" icon in the Outlook toolbar.

You can download Outlook Export here:
http://www.codetwo.com/pages/freeware/outlook_export.php

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Best regards,
Michal [Microsoft Outlook MVP]

http://www.codetwo.com
Share Outlook on the net without Exchange!

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