Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Export contacts from Lotus to Outlook

A colleague asked to help her transfer all my contacts from Lotus to Outlook. I thought this would been a very simple thing at first, but there are actually quiet some hassle in this. Let's see some of the solutions that seemed to work, but don't first:
  1. CSV & Tab-delimit: These formats is accepted by both software; however, Lotus Notes refuse to export full information for each contact for neither format.
  2. VCard: Vcard is also accepted by both software, and Lotus does export all information of each contact into one Vcard file. However, Outlook refuse to read beyond the first entry of the VCard file.
  3. Buy a product or twig some complicated configuration: I don't want to put her through neither process.
That was some frustrating process for somthing so simple. Then I though Gmail. =)
  1. Export all contacts from Lotus Notes into VCard format.
  2. Sign-in Gmail (or Sign-up for one, it's great! ;]) , click on Contact on the left side.
  3. Create a temporary group to store the imported contacts. (this will help to identify the newly imported contacts, and help to clean up your Gmail contact after you are done)
  4. On the right of contact page, select Import. Find the .vcf file, and in Also add these imported contacts to: select temporary (you just created).
  5. In the temporary group, select all contacts, and click Export. Under What format would you like to export to? select Outlook's CSV format.
  6. Now you have a CSV file, import this file into Outlook, wola! You are all good. =)

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