by Svetlana Cheusheva, updated on
Learn how to export contacts from Outlook to CSV or PST file: all or by category, your personal contacts or Global Address List, from Outlook Online or desktop.
Whether you are migrating to another email service or making a regular backup of your Outlook data, it is crucial to transfer all contact details without any fail. This tutorial will teach you a few easy ways to export Outlook contacts into a .csv or .pst file, so that you could later import them anywhere you need including Excel, Google Docs, Gmail and Yahoo.
Tip. If you are faced with the opposite task, the following tutorials will be helpful:
Microsoft Outlook provides a special wizard that makes exporting contacts to CSV straightforward and fast. In just a few clicks, you will have your address book in a .csv format importable to Excel, Google Docs, and many other spreadsheet apps. You can also import the CSV file into Outlook or another email app such as Gmail or Yahoo.
To export Outlook contacts to CSV, this is what you need to do:
Note. If you've used the export feature before, the previous location and file name will appear automatically. Be sure to type a different file name before clicking OK, unless you want to overwrite the existing file.
If you'd rather choose for yourself which information to export, click Map Custom Fields and continue with the next steps.
To make sure that all your contacts have been successfully transferred, open the newly created CSV file in Excel or any other program that supports the .csv format.
Although exporting Outlook contacts with the built-in wizard is fast and easy, this method does have a few drawbacks:
If the above limitations are critical for you, then try a WYSIWYG approach described in the next section.
Another way to export Outlook contacts is the good old copy-paste method. The main advantage of this approach is that you can copy any field that exists in Outlook and visually see all the details you are exporting.
Here are the steps to perform:
To get even more columns to choose from, pick All Contact fields from the Select available columns from dropdown list.
To change the order of columns in your custom view, use the Move Up or Move down buttons in the right pane.
To remove a column, select it in the right pane and click the Remove button.
When finished, click OK.
The major part of the job is done, and you just need to press a couple of shortcuts to save the result of your work.
That's it! Though the steps might look a bit lengthy on paper, in practice they only take a few minutes to perform.
If you are looking to transfer your contacts from one Outlook account to another or from your old computer to a new one, the easiest way is exporting to a .pst file. Apart from contacts, you can also export your emails, appointments, tasks and notes, all at once.
To export contacts to a .pst file, here are the steps to perform:
Tip. If you'd like to transfer all items, not just contacts, select the name of the email account to export.
Outlook begins the export immediately. How long it will take generally depends on the number of items you are exporting.
When you have contacts in different categories such as business, personal, etc., you may want to export only a specific category, not all contacts. This can be done in two different ways.
To export your Outlook contacts by category to Excel or another program that allows copy/pasting, carry out these steps:
To export several categories, repeat steps 3 and 4 for each category or use one of the following alternatives:
When exporting contacts from another PC or a different Outlook account as .pst file, you can also export categories. However, you need to explicitly tell Outlook to do so. Here's how:
Note. Both of the above methods export contacts in selected categories but neither keeps the category colors. After importing the contacts into Outlook, you will have to set up the colors anew.
Outlook on the web and Outlook.com have a built-in option to export contacts to a .csv file. Here's how it works:
Depending on your browser, you will find the downloaded contacts.csv file at the button of the page or will be prompted to open it in Excel. After opening the file, save it to your PC or a cloud storage.
While you can easily transfer your own contact folders from Outlook, there seems to be no direct way to export Exchange-based contact lists of your organization or any kind of Offline Address Book. However, you can add the items of the Global Address List to your personal Contacts folder, and then export all the contacts. To have it done, perform these steps:
And now, nothing prevents you from exporting all your contacts to a .csv or .pst file in the usual way.
Tips:
That's how you export contacts from Outlook. I thank you for reading and hope to see you on our blog next week!
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