Written by: Brett Wenzlaff of Source Networks, Inc.
This can be particularly helpful if you have a Microsoft Outlook 2011 email Database that is non-repairable but you can salvage the “Recent Address” file or you simply want to create a new Outlook Identity and migrate over the “recent addresses” from the old Identity.
These manual steps will result in converting “recent addresses” into actual contacts in your Outlook Address Book where these new Contacts will only have email address info (but you can always fill in name and other data).
NOTE: Depending on how many addresses are in your file and how much cleanup is required, this process could take 15 minutes to maybe 55 minutes!
In brief, we’re going to do the following;
- Open Recent Address file in TextEdit and do preliminary cleanup.
- Copy to Microsoft Word and do more cleanup & altering.
- Paste into Excel and save into a CSV format.
- Import the CSV file into the Outlook Address Book.
DETAILED STEPS BELOW:
Locate the “recent” address file in your user “home folder” at this location; ~\Documents\Microsoft User Data\Office 2011 Identities\”User Identity Name”\Data Records\Recent Addresses\OT\OB\OM\OK (or similar name on this last folder)\x19_”some-varied-number”.olk14recent (and option-drag it to copy it to your desktop or folder of choice).
Double click this file then choose to open it using the Apple TextEdit program.
Scroll up and down this document to identify the section(s) of contiguous email addresses as opposed to other sections that will look like gibberish text (Note: my file had gibberish text codes, then email addresses, then another section of gibberish text followed by a second section of email addresses – so identify how many “sections” contain email address info).
Delete all the gibberish codes in front of the email addresses, in between any sections of email addresses as well as delete all gibberish codes after the email addresses and you should be left with a long contiguous list of email addresses without any (or most) of the gibberish text.
SAMPLE “TEXT-EDIT” PIC BELOW (DELETE ALL “GIBBERSIH”);
Save this file in TextEdit as something like “Recent Addresses Raw Text”.
Launch Microsoft Word 2011 then open the newly created “Raw Text” file (note: if your “Raw Text” filename is grayed-out - you might have to hit the “ENABLE” drop-down menu and select “All Readable Documents”), then on the next window I chose text encoding of “MS-DOS” and “Western (Mac OS Roman)”.
Once the file is open in Word, scroll up and down all pages and delete any straggler gibberish characters that still might have imported in either the front, mid-section or in back end of the contiguous email addresses.
SAMPLE “WORD” PIC BELOW (DELETE ALL “GIBBERISH”);
Next in Word, use the Edit pull-down menu to select “Find”, then select the sub-menu “Replace” which should open the “Find and Replace” window.
At this point we’re going to do a little “quality” test on the document by entering in the upper “Find” box the characters “.com” (without the quotation marks). Scroll down the list to examine all of the .com’s that are highlighted, typically that 2nd section of email addresses will have some .com’s but they are not showing as highlighted. If you do see some .com’s that are not highlighted, then perform the next “special” step to help clean these funky email addresses!
SAMPLE WORD 2011 “FIND/REPLACE” BOX SEARCH (FOR ABOVE STEP);
SPECIAL STEP (TYPICALLY REQUIRED) à Copy all the text/email addresses in Word then paste it into a new blank TextEdit document, then copy all the text in TextEdit then paste it back into a new Word document. This should get rid of some “hidden spaces” that are in that 2nd “funky” email section where some of your .com email addresses did not hightlight - but for some reason Word does not display nor identify them correctly with the hidden spaces. You might want to repeat the previous step to ensure all “.com’s” are now showing highlighted throughout the entire document!
In the upper “Find” box put in .com, in the lower “Replace” box put .com then hit the pull-down menu to the right of the second box and select “Manual Line Break” (see pictures below), then hit the “Replace All” button (Note: Word 2008 is slightly different).
SAMPLE WORD 2011 2nd BOX DROP-DOWN SELECT “MANUAL LINE BREAK”;
SAMPLE WORD 2011 FIND/REPLACE WITH LINE-BREAK SHOULD LOOK LIKE THIS (Before You Hit the “Replace All” button, note the added characters after the .com);
(Note in above sample – there are “177-matches” that will get placed onto individual lines as a result of the “Manual Line Break” we added).
Next, repeat the same step above but use .net in place of .com (in both boxes).
Next, repeat the same step and in both boxes use .org. This should separate most, if not all of your email addresses onto their own individual lines but if you see a number of “.edu” or “.us” or other email domain names you can repeat the above step for those domains as required to make every email address show on an it’s own line. Next you will scroll up and down the document and clean up any straggler gibberish files.
NOTE: the emails for the domain “COMcast” may have been split into two segments so connect any “broken” Comcast email addresses along with delete any other non-valid looking emails that typically result from that funky “2nd section”.
Save the cleaned up Word file to whatever name you want.
Copy all lines of the now cleaned up email addresses in this document then paste them into a new Excel document starting at row #2 (we’re going to be using row #1 for some “header” labels).
Do a spot check to see how many email addresses pasted into the Excel document by scrolling down to the bottom of the list to see what row number the last entry is on (eg, if the last entry is on row 131 we know we have 130 addresses and we’ll use this “count” as a quality check after importing them into Outlook).
On the first row place the following into Cells A1, B1 & C1 respectively;
Email Address 1
Firstname
Lastname
SAMPLE EXCEL 2011 WITH “HEADER” LINE BEFORE SAVE AS CSV;
NOTE: Don’t worry about the “Firstname” and “Lastname” cells next to the email addresses being empty, this is simply a requirement to set up the file as a properly formatted “CSV” (comma separated value) file.
Next do an Excel “Save As” and on the Format drop down menu select “Comma Separated Value (.csv)” and name the file whatever you want.
Exit Excel and launch Outlook.
Click on the Outlook “Contacts” / Address Book.
If you want to ultimately place the “Recent Addresses” we’re about to import in a separate folder, you might want to make a new temporary sub-folder called something like “Main Contacts Temp” and then drag all your main contacts into that sub-folder so your main Contacts is now empty (as it is our main “Contacts” folder where our new “CSV” contacts will import to and we want to keep them separated).
Next on the Outlook File pull-down menu select “Import” and on the next window select “Contacts or Messages From a Text File” then hit the arrow on lower-right.
On the next window select “Import Contacts From A Tab- or Comma-Delimited Text File and hit the arrow at the lower-right.
On the next window – navigate to where ever you saved the Excel “CSV” file and select it, you might want to scroll part way down the this import window list to ensure your Email Address 1 “mapping” is automatically lined up with the “Email Address 1” then hit the “Import” button.
OUTLOOK 2011 IMPORT WINDOW (Email Address 1 = Email Address 1):
This should have imported all email addresses into your main Address Book “Contacts” window (where you can check the number of contacts and compare it to your Excel list as a quality check).
At this point you might want to make yet a new Address Book sub-folder called “Recent Addresses” and move all the newly imported emails into there.
Lastly, move all your main addresses from the “Main Contacts Temp” folder back into the main Address Book Contacts folder.
Now that all the “recent address” emails are in your Outlook Address Book, when you start a new email and go to type an email address it will access them from the address book and they will be presented as a choice in the drop-down list of email addresses.