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We wrote this FAQ to answer the many questions we receive on this topic from our clients and other inquiring minds in the many electronic communities we frequent.
This FAQ is taken from Office 97 Annoyances (by Woody Leonhard, Lee Hudspeth, and T.J. Lee; ISBN 1-56592-310-3; O'Reilly and Associates). For additional information on this title, visit our site's page http://www.primeconsulting.com/annoyances.
Click here to order Office 97 Annoyances from Amazon.
Q: I have data on hundreds of people already in my Exchange Personal Address Book (PAB). How can I convert this data to Outlook's Contacts list with a minimum of fuss?
A: If you've been using Windows 95 and Outlook's predecessor, Exchange, you probably already have all your names and addresses tucked in the personal address book - mailbox.pab - commonly referred to as the PAB. Outlook has its own address book known as the Contacts list (a.k.a. the Outlook Address Book).
For reasons we'll be discussing in the following sections, you should consider getting your PAB data into Outlook. The trick is getting your information from the PAB to the Contacts list. Not to worry, we'll walk you through the process.
The first thing to be aware of is that Outlook only recognizes one PAB at a time-the one that is referenced in the current profile. To check your profile in Outlook, click Tools / Services. On the Services tab, you'll see a list of the current services for the profile you're using. To see which mailbox.pab file the profile service is referencing (assuming you have more than one), select Personal Address Book and then click on the Properties button.
The Personal Address Book dialog displays the path to the PAB file referenced in the profile. If this is not the file you want to import to your Contacts list, click the Browse button and select the PAB file you want imported.
Once you have the proper PAB file referenced, just click on OK and then on OK in the Services dialog. You are now ready to import the PAB entries to an Outlook Contacts list.
Outlook has a Contacts folder for storing your contacts, but you can create multiple Contacts lists. This is useful if you want to keep your business contacts separated from your personal contacts. Or you may create a Contacts list for a special project and want to keep the people on that list separate from all other contacts.
To create a new folder for Contacts, click on File / New and then choose Folder on the cascading menu that appears. This displays the Create New Folder dialog box. In the folder tree, select the folder under which you want to create your subfolder. Type in a Name for your folder and be sure to tell Outlook what type of data this folder will contain. Under the label "Folder contains" is a drop-down list of the types of data your Outlook folders can contain. You must select Contact Items or you will not be able to import PAB data to it. Click on OK to return to Outlook.
Next, pull down the File menu and click on the Import and Export option. This starts the Import and Export Wizard. Preposterous as it may seem, there is no specific choice for importing a personal address book. How obvious is it that when you want to import a PAB, you should choose the "Import from Schedule+ or another program or file" option? Anyway, that's the option you want. Click on Next to proceed to the next step.
This next list is much less cryptic. Scroll down the list and you'll find an option for Personal Address Book. Select this option and click on the Next button. If you have created a new folder (and have set the folder type to Contact Items), select it as the destination folder. To use the default folder, just click on Contacts in the list. Click on Next to proceed.
All that's left is to click on the Finish button and start the import process.
Once you click on Finish you'll see the Import and Export Progress status box that lets you monitor the progress as the PAB is imported to Outlook.
When the import process is complete, the status box disappears and you can display your Contacts list in Outlook. You can't filter the PAB, it's an all or nothing proposition, but once you have the data translated as Contact items, you can search the list and prune the records as needed.
Contact lists provide you more flexibility in Outlook than trying to work with the PAB, but don't discard the Personal Address Book from your profile just yet. Outlook has no provision for email distribution lists at present, so keep that PAB around until Microsoft fixes this glaring omission.
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