Importing Contacts from Access Database to Outlook...

[DariustheSandman]

I have a client that wants to import the contact information from his Access database into his Outlook. I don't really have much in the way of programming skills, and I'm not quite sure what to do. I know that Outlook will not do this by default. Any suggestions?

 

[Virtus]

It depends on the Access database. How are you going to get the data out of it? Did the developer make an export function? If not, it would be very simple to make a query that grabs the needed information. That query could be exported as a CSV that Outlook could import.

Outlook 2007 will also grab data directly from Access 97-2003, but it has to be set up properly.

 

[DariustheSandman]

I know relatively little about access. I've mostly been a hardware guy, with some network and OS support thrown in. I am a bit out of my depth. How do I go about finding out what you need to know?

 

[Virtus]

Microsoft Access is like a development environment and not a finished program like Excel. So it's up to the person who wrote your database whether or not there is an export function.

So first you need to find out if they included a function to export your desired data to a CSV file. The only way to find out is to ask or poke around the menus. If it's not there you can ask the developer to create the function, or export the data for you (it's really easy).

If there is not a function or button that will export everything, you can still grab the data if the computer is running the full version of Access (and not just the runtime version). You would create a query and export it as a CSV or excel file. That's a little more complicated, but very do-able.