This tip is about how to import contacts from an Excel spreadsheet into your Outlook contacts. There are a couple of things that you need to do first before you actually do the import. Let us go to our Excel spreadsheet.
First of all, I am in Excel 2007. However, it may surprise you to know that Outlook will not import an Excel 2007 spreadsheet, so not an xls spreadsheet. What I have to do is save this as an earlier version spreadsheet. That is the first thing that you have to know. Again, it might be a surprise to you. Let us go ahead and do that. So File, Save As, save it as an Excel 97 to 2003 workbook. I will leave it the same name. That is fine. It is going to put it at some place where I know it always is at. Save and there we go.
Next thing you need to know is that you should have a header row. If you do know the names of the Outlook fields that they are going to go into, you could name them the same and that will help the import process but it is not required. I am going to show you how to map those fields if Outlook does not recognize where a particular field it is suppose to go. For example, zip code in my Excel spreadsheet is going to be postal code in Outlook. I will show you how to manually map fields from what they call spreadsheet to Outlook.
First of all, give yourself a header row. Make sure that the information is separated into the proper fields. Now, Outlook does its best to divide them up which is called parsing to divide up. So if you have field that is a combination first name, last name, that is okay because Outlook will actually parse that out for you. It is smart enough to recognize that so it may not always get all of them accurately. In other words, if the name has got a lot of names in their self, it has got like a hyphenated name but you did not hyphenate it. Dr., Mr., Jr., I mean those are all parts of a name. But, Outlook has to figure out what part of this name goes in this part of Outlook? So if you can divide it up, great. If it is not, then that is okay. Just to let you know that Outlook does its best to parse out the information. But, if you want to be absolutely sure that you do not have to do any clean up after the path, you might want to clean it up before you could bring it in to Outlook as far as separating things out into the proper columns. Then, divide up the names and the address into proper columns. Keep that in mind.
Also, you are going to want to do something that is called naming the range. Now, Outlook requires that you name the range of the data that you are pulling in. It sounds complicated. But, trust me, watch what happens, I am going to click the first column. Obviously, you are going to have more than three names. I am going to go to the last cell. I am going to hold my shift key down, select the range of cells that I want to bring in to Outlook. And then over here where it says A1 in the name box, I am simply going to say My Contacts or Contacts. I am going to hit my Enter Key on my keyboard. I have just named the range of cells on my Excel spreadsheet to My contacts. This is very, very important. In an Excel spreadsheet, if it is an xls file and you do not name the range, Outlook will pull up an error message when you try to do the import. And sometimes, people get a little confused but if you read it in there, it says, “Hey, I need you to name the range of the cells.” If you see any error that says something about naming ranges in your Excel spreadsheet, this is what it is talking about so, just do that before hand and you will not get that error.
So, I am going to save this and now, the next thing that is very important is you have to close the spreadsheet because Outlook will not import information from the spreadsheet that is open. You have to close the spreadsheet. It is importdemo.xls I just have to know where that file is, locate it and I am good to go. Now, you are going to want to import those and my recommendation obviously is to import those contacts into its own separate contact folder. I am going to right click on contacts, I am going to say new folder and
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