iPhone Sync with Outlook 2000 Contacts Import Solution
Wed, July 4, 2007 at 07:00AM I have to admit that I find synchronization baffling. Most of the time, it works great. But when it doesn't, iTunes seems oversimplified and lacking detail to make it work.
My example here is Outlook 2000. Why am I still running Outlook 2000? Well, it got old on me. Office 2003 was no big change, so I never upgraded. Office XP is nice but I don't really need it. Maybe when I get it at work I'll upgrade so that I don't have a different work/home UI to deal with.
Anyway, iTunes doesn't say much during syncing, but it sure doesn't like Outlook 2000. It doesn't throw a big error message like a Windows program would; instead you just don't see anything when you're done.
Outlook 2000 will probably never sync with the iPhone, But I found a solution to at least IMPORT contact data from it into the iPhone. Here are the steps for this fairly easy 2-minute process:
1) Open Outlook 2000 and select File : Import/Export
2) Choose "Export to a File"
3) Choose "Comma Separated Values (Windows)"
4) Select your Contacts folder
5) Select your desktop or other place to save the temporary export file. Remember this name/location for step 10.
6) Click "Finish"
7) Now you need to open Windows Address Book. It is found in Start : All Programs: Accessories : Address Book
8) If it asks you if you want it to be your default vCard viewer, click "No"
9) Now we will import your contacts from the file you created using Outlook. Choose File : Import : Other Address Book : Text File (Comma Separated Values)
10) Choose the file you saved (in Step 5 you picked the name/location)
11) "Files of Type" will default to CSV; leave it at that and click "Open"
12) Click "Next" and accept the default field mappings
13) Click Finish
14) Now dock your iPhone and select the "Info" tab on your iPhone section of iTunes
15) Click "Sync contacts from:"and choose "Windows Address Book" instead of Outlook
16) Click "Sync" at the lower right of the iTunes screen. Voila!
Please let me know if this does or doesn't work for you. It is a nice one-time fix. I suppose you could use Windows Address Book to manage your contacts going forward, but yuck!
Charles Gordon
UPDATE: This fix can be problematic and can lead to your contacts being deleted from your iPhone. Read on!
We associated our iPhone/iTunes account with the Windows Address Book when we did the import. This worked fine for me. Then, somehow, WAB decided to associate itself with Outlook. Then, because this didn't work, iTunes kept overwriting the iPhones contacts with WAB contacts--which were a grand total of ZERO.
You can tell you will have this problem if your file : import/export options in WAB are grayed out.
To fix it, do this:
1) In WAB, go to tools : options
2) In the Data Sharing options, select "Do not share..."
3) Restart WAB and make sure the import/export functions are available. (Not a bad time to make a backup, either!)
4) Sync up your iPhone..should work!
Reader Comments (72)
Thank you very much. I used this fix (I too am in Outlook 2000) and it worked like a charm.
I am using Outlook 2000 as well and stuck with it. I regret that Apple did not just collaborate with Google and offer an iTunes plugin for contacts and calendar that could work directly with iPhone. Anyway, I have a more extended problem:
I need the ability to update my contacts in Outlook 2000 and sync with iPhone on a recurring basis, so the one-time only solution does not work for me since I continually update contacts on the iPhone and Outlook. The problem is I do not want iPhone to sync with the Outlook "contacts" off the root folder of Outlook. Rather, I want to sync iPhone with the personal folder contacts I have. Long story short, but I have so many contacts that putting them on the root folder causes extended network performance problems when Outlook tries to sync with my server, so I just keep them as a personal folder.
Do you know any way to tell the iTunes Outlook sync to sync with a personal folder in Outlook vs the default tree? There must be a way I can backdoor this in the registry or something, but I cannot figure it out for the life of me.
Please help.
I read somewhere (sorry, don't remember where) that subfolder syncronization was a known issues that would likely be resolved by Apple. But even if they fix it, I doubt that Outlook 2000 will be supported.
One thing I've noticed is that I forgot to un-sync the Windows Address Book and, sure enough, it works just fine. I don't intend to start using that instead of Outlook(!), but at least it is a good place for a PC backup of your iPhone contacts.
You might be able to trick Outlook into using a WAB file for contacts, especially as Outlook Express uses that.
Longer term, though, I think we are going to have to replace Outlook 2000.
Quick update. I found a temporary solution. I downloaded the Microsoft Outlook 2007 free 60 day trial at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/default.aspx
This is the last thing I wanted to do, but I figure it will provide me 60 days to wait for Apple, Google, or someone else to solve this problem. Actually I am hoping for a nice calendar and address book option that works with Google and then I can discontinue using Outlook, but I have my fingers crossed. At least I can use Outlook 2007 for now to add/edit data and sync it back with iPhone.
60 days? You made a deal with the devil! :)
It will be be really interesting to see how forthcoming Apple is with the updates. It is a great platform to keep current, so I hope the answer is early and often.
I tried it and it didn't work! The only thing that I see that is different is that I named my temporary file contacts in the root directory and the Windows address book found it automatically. Could that make any difference? At any rate, if you have another suggestion, I would surely appreciate it! I think I can get a copy of 2003 next week since some of my co-workers have upgraded to 2007, but would love to have this resolved over the weekend. Thanks for your help!
Renea, as of last night I think there is a major problem with iTunes and contact syncing, at least in terms of using the Windows Address Book. Appparently it will sync contacts FROM the iPhone into the computer, but won't add any TO the iPhone. Also, if you check the "Replace this information on this iPhone" box, it will DELETE every contact from your phone.
Stay tuned for updates on this site, we're going through the same issues. I'm really trying to avoid buying another copy of MS Office for Windows because I'd rather buy it as a Mac version when I migrate to the Macintosh later this year.
Just looked at the file in explorer and it sees it as an excel file - could that be part of the problem? I can't even get the contacts info out of windows address book now, even by deleting the original file! Guess it saved it elsewhere!
The Excel association is fine, that is not the problem.
You are right! In my Address Book the import/export are grayed out. Give me a few minutes, I want to check this out.
Renea, thank you for giving me a different perspective...you helped me fix my problem which was (I thought) unrelated. And the fix should work for you, too!
I posted the steps as an update to the original post
Yeah!!!! The import process appears to be vital! If the Microsoft address book just automatically sees the file without importing it, you get nowhere. I now have all my contacts on my iphone - thanks so much!!!! Perhaps Apple will work on this problem later, but thanks so much for working through this with me!
Fantastic! Glad it worked out for you.
Thanks for all of the information about importing my contacts via the windows address book. It worked perfectly except for one thing. All of the names were missing from my iPhone. All I saw was the contact e-mail address. I can see the names perfectly in the windows address book, but not on the iphone. Do you have any solutions to this problem?
Ryan, can you click on an individual contact in WAB, and go to the "Name" tab? What do you see there? I'm guessing somehow your names maybe ended up in the nicknames field?
Another thing to try...open the exported .csv file you created with Outlook, using Excel. Are the names columns in the wrong place? You could actually try editing it in Excel if needed, might actually be the easiest way to fix the whole set rather than one-by-one in WAB.
Hi Charles, in the WAB all the info is correct. When I click on the contact info the names are sorted in the last, first name fields. The nickname is actually blank. I have tried reformatting the file, but the file looks good. This seems to be a random problem though.
I uploaded a blank .csv file which is just the one I used without the contacts. You can use it to compare with yours. I have to believe that somehow yours has the columns in an order that iTunes can't transpose.
Give it a look: exported contacts.csv
Do you happen to know if it is possible to import contacts from a Palm Treo to the iPhone? And if so, how one might do it.
Just saw this question about importing contacts from a Palm Treo to the iPhone. OK I will be honest with you I consider myself the master of this process in the United States right now. I spent 20 hours on this problem the first weekend I had the iPhone and I know all the ins and outs of this.
Basically I will save you a lot of time. Here is my recommendation.
1 - In Palm Desktop, make sure you are viewing all your contacts (all categories visible) and then select: EXPORT, FILE TYPE (COMMA SEPARATED, CSV). This will make a CSV file on your PC somewhere.
1 - Get a yahoo email account or use your current Yahoo account.
2 - Go to the address book feature from Yahoo Mail
3 - Select import/export.
4 - You will be walked through the steps to import contacts Palm desktop. Select CSV. Choose the CSV file you exported from Palm Desktop.
5 - Wait a moment as Yahoo sucks in your contacts.
6 - Enjoy.
This worked well for me and iTunes can keep your contacts in sync with Yahoo Address Book too.
Mark
Mark, thanks for that detailed help on Palm importing! I imagine that if you can create the CSV file in your steps 1-4, then you could also import that file into Windows Address Book or Outlook 2003 or later if you didn't want to use Yahoo.
Great tip!
Actually I found that to import my contacts into Outlook 2003/2007 (no Yahoo) the best way was to do a tab delimited export from Palm Desktop. This was important since a comma delimited export did not preserve the line breaks in my notes (which are very important to me).
For calendar migration from Palm Desktop to Outlook 2003/2007 I found it worked best to export as a Date Book Archive, then import into Yahoo calendar, then export out from Yahoo as CSV for import back into Outlook 2003/2007. Believe it or not that worked best and I could not find a way to export from Palm Desktop into a format Outlook could directly understand. Others have done the same thing.
Bottom line -- I do not want to use Outlook. I really think Apple would be bold to have made a conduit from Palm Desktop to iTunes. That would have really provided a nice transition for Treo users.