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)
Interesting. I'm going to try Yahoo for managing my contacts and calendar and see how well it works. It might give me a better overall solution.
Mark & Charles . . . thank you both for your input and wisdom. I may hold out a while to see if Apple comes up with a Palm Desktop to iTunes conduit, but if the iPhones draw is too strong, it is nice to know I have a way to transfer my info. Thanks
Ryan & Charles,
I am having the same problem. When I sync my Windows Address Book, the name doesn't sync, only the phone numbers. The email address gets put into the "other" field on the iphone, and then it appears as the name when I look at the contact list. So the name isn't getting transferred, and the email address is getting transferred into the wrong field. I started from a CSV file and imported that into the WAB but once it's in there I don't know why the column order would matter...everything is in the correct field in the WAB.
Incidentally, I've gone weeks without being able to get my contacts on my iphone, because their numbers were trapped on a flash drive Cingular gave me with the numbers from my old phone. I had to install some weird program for editing SIM data which required installing .NET as well. I couldn't export from the SIM program, so I had to take screenshots and use OCR to get a text file that could be made into a CSV file. Now the data appears to be correct in the WAB, it's just that the iphone is misinterpreting it. The bad thing is, as I sync back and forth, the corrupted data forms new entries in the WAB. The good thing is that I went to a backup of my OS, so I don't have .NET bogging me down anymore.
OK, I solved the problem, for myself at least. Ryan, when you imported your CSV, was the name all in one field? WAB puts this in the "display name" field. It also SHOWS the first and last name split up correctly, but it doesn't actually save these in the fields--it's like a calculated value rather than a stored one. The iphone has one field each for first name and last name, but no field for the full name, so the information doesn't transfer. When I split the names into first and last name fields before importing the CSV, everything transferred correctly!
There are two fixes for this. The easier is to remap the single column of full names (during CSV import) to WAB's "Last Name" instead of "Name". This will make it all appear in unbolded text. If you choose first name, it will all appear in bolded text. The slightly more complicated option is to split the field into first and last name in Excel (so iphone can make only the first name bold). Directions for doing this are at LauraJ's Weblog. It's important to insert a bunch of extra columns after the name field, or better yet put the name field all the way at the right, since Excel will overwrite whatever data is in the columns as it expands the name. For example, I had "Dorothy and Jeff Smith" which became 4 columns.
Hope this helps Ryan and whoever else might google it up. Sorry for two very long comments!
Melissa, I'm glad you were able to find a solution. I had to laugh when you mentioned screenshots and OCR, though...I think you can claim bragging rights for the most exotic "sync" of contacts to an iPhone!
Just to be clear, on a Windows based PC you can only sync your iPhone calendar with Outlook 2003 or 2007. You cannot sync iPhone calendar with Yahoo calendar. I wish you could. In fact, I would very much like to see an iTunes upgrade in August from Apple that would allow 4-5 more contact and calendar sync options from iTunes. Or Apple could make this much easier and allow over-the-air (wireless) syncing of iPhone contacts and calendar with a server. Personally, I would rather do this, then all my desktop tools would just sync with the server and not even need to know about the phone. 1 server, multiple clients, all in sync, is honestly the best way to do this. I would very much like to see iPhone sync with Google contacts and Google calendar of course. The first time this over-the-air mode would occur, it would probably take 5-10 minutes, but all the incremental updates would be fast.
Hello,
I had a random error this morning with syncing Outlook 2007 with my iPhone. Basically iTunes reported the following error during the sync process:
"Either there is no default mail client or the current mail client cannot fulfill the messaging request. Please run Microsoft Outlook and set it as the default mail client."
After an hour of searching I found the solution. To resolve this go into Internet Explorer, Tools Menu Item, Internet Options, then the Programs Tab. Then make sure 'Microsoft Office Outlook' is set as the 'Program' for Email, Calendar, and Contact List. I had Thunderbird set as the email Program of choice. So Outlook does not like when you set other programs for Email. Oh well. Bottom line changing everything to Microsoft Office Outlook in the Programs menu immediately fixed this problem.
Thanks for the help with the Outlook 2000 issue! Your site is a lifesaver!
Excellent. Tried everyting else, but nothing worked. Your advise helped like butter.
You're a total genius - thanks so much!
You're a total genius - thanks so much!
hi,
It really puzzled me initially why my contacts on Outlook 2000 didn't sync with my iPhone. Thanks for this idea. All are on my iPhone now. Great stuff!
hi there,
just wanted to say, that it worked for me with outlook 2002.
I have my iPhone since 2 days and having exact the here discussed problem but couldn't resolve it despite the excellent hints given.
I bought a pda 1,5 years ago and remembered
it had a cd with an outlook version with it and as I checked it was outlook 2002. young enough for working with my apple software? yes, it worked immediately after deinstalling the 2000 version and installing outlook vers. 2002 - hooray!!
it is amazing how much time people spend on such topics - but I am very grateful about that fact since the producing companies aren't able to support their customers in that manner! thank you so much!
Indeed, iTunes doesn't like at all Microsoft Outlook 2000. Exporting the contacts, and recreating them under Microsoft Address book solves the problem, although it is not the most convenient. Thanks anyway for the great idea:)
jad
My wife is loving the Outlook 2000 on her Iphone.
We have not updated the Iphone since this was accomplished in late 2007 for fear of losing the Outlook 2000 feature. Should we update the software on the Iphone? How can we do this without losing Outlook 2000? Also we use Spamfighter on our Windows XP/Outlook 2000 computers. Is there a "Spamfighter" like application that will work with Iphone?
Guys, I have the same problem almost every week: Simply by no "obvious" reason all contacts disappear. All of you have done a great job finding out how to "upload" contacts back to the device. But what really matters is: How to avoid the contacts from disappearing! Has anyone found out how avoiding this? Detected some bug? Maybe a no native application is generating this loss? Thank you, kind regards.
I put all my contacts into Adress Book and tried to import the contacts, but they didn't show up in my iPhone. I have a Mac. I'm just frusterated because I don't have any contacts on my phone and am not ready to manually enter 200 contacts.
Please help!!
dude, that's very SMART!
thanks a TON!
This group seems quite expert in syncing iPhones with Outlook so I thought I would post a recent problem that I have uncovered. My wife has had her iPhone for only about 3 months. When we set it up for iTunes to sync with her Outlook Contacts (Outlook 2002), everything appeared to worked perfectly. All the contacts came down from the PC to the iPhone, and when she made a change on the iPhone, that changed would be refleted in the Contact on the PC next time she synced with iTunes.
However, she began to hear that people were not getting emails sent from Outlook. After poking around at this for a few days, I found that whenever she made a change to a contact on the iPhone, after resyncing with iTunes the corresponding Contact in Outlook was corrupted or something so that when she would send an email to that contact, Outlook couldn't find an email address. Unfortunately, Outlook didn't provide any kind of warning when she went those emails, but that explained why they were not being received by the intended recipient.
The way that I finally was able to reproduce the problem was as follows: 1) Pick a contact to experiment with. 2) Go to Address Book in Outlook. You should find that your chosen contact has a valide email address listed there. 3) Now change that contact on the iPhone by adding an additional phone number for example. 4) Sync the iPhone with iTunes. 5)Now go to Address Book in Outlook again, and you should find that the contact you were workking with now has no email address listed.
Have any of you had this same kind of problem? Any fixes?
Thanks for any suggestions.
Roger Swanson, Portland, Oregon
Thank you thank you thank you!!! After many hours I was finally able to sync my contacts using the WAB!!