Importing Outlook Contacts into Lotus Notes 8.5

Anthony Holmes  15 June 2009 01:36:58 PM

The Notes 8.5 client now has a nice way of importing contacts that have been exported from Outlook.

With many other mail systems (such as Gmail and Apple's mail) the standard for exchanging contacts is vCards. However, as at Outlook 2007, it seems that Outlook can only import single vCards, and it can't export multiple vCard addresses (although add on programs allow this). So, to get around that problem, IBM lets you follow another path.

Part 1: Exporting from Outlook

Within Outlook, choose File; Import and Export...

Choose Export to a File... and press Next >



Choose Tab Separated Values (Windows) and click Next >



Select Contacts and press Next >



Choose the place where you want to save the export and give the exported file a name (ending in .txt).

On the next screen, press Finish


Part 2: Importing to Notes

Open your personal address book (Contacts).

Choose File; Import Contacts

 

You are then presented with a dialog that lets you inspect any or all of the contacts you are importing:



Note: In the image above, all the green rectangles contained my contact details. (I've blanked them so I don't tell the entire world my details. This screen is extremely useful: you can look at any contact before you import it and see how it will import. You can see if there is any data that won't map nicely, and take action to import it (through "Map Fields"). The default configuration works very well.

Once you click Import the records are imported.

The final message tells you that your contacts have been imported and that you can examine them by looking in your Your Contacts view and clicking on the Modified Date column. If you happen to be looking at your contacts in the Business Cards display, you'll need to change to the List display. To do this select View; Show; List.

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