subject: Managing Outlook Duplicate Contacts [print this page] Our MS Outlook email account is always flooded with emails, notes, drafts, contacts, etc. And when you are in a business environs, then this doesnt seem to stop, as numerous emails, contacts are to be dealt every day. If you use Outlook regularly, then its quite obvious that youll undoubtedly run into duplicate items from time to time. Usually, duplicate items result from actions taken outside of your normal day-to-day operations. The most common example is importing data into PST file. Hence importing data into a PST file turns out to be the main culprit creating duplicate entries and problem shoots up when you import contacts.
Thankfully, MS Outlook provides different options while importing data and allows you managing duplicate contacts or items or emails during the import process. If you try to import a contact with an existing name or email address, Outlook will generate a duplicate contact error. Whether youre importing contacts from a flat file like, .csv file, MS Excel spreadsheet or from another source for example, .PST file, address book from another application, Outlook firstly provides you with the following three options:
Replace existing item with the imported duplicate
Allow Outlook to create duplicate entries
Disallow the duplicate item to be imported
These options always come up when a user tries to import contacts from one PST file into contacts folder of another PST file, of another folder in the mailbox, or a public Exchange Server folder (with permission of course).
When importing a large number of contacts where duplicates are likely to exist, you might want to clean up the content if possible before you import it into Outlook. For this you are supposed to above mentioned first or third option. The problem with allowing Outlook to create duplicates is that Outlook has no native mechanism for resolving duplicates after import. In addition, no undo feature exists after importing into Outlook. Removing duplicate contacts is a fairly manual process. One solution is to export existing contacts into the same format as the source to be imported, and then compare those files. This approach works well with .csv files, using a tool such as csvdiff.
This manual approach is cumbersome and tiring and one cant be assure of complete removal of duplicate contacts as manual process is somewhat filled with flaws. So what could be done in such times? Well you can remove duplicate contacts using Outlook Duplicates Remover software, a renowned name in its arena for removing Outlook duplicate items including contacts. Outlook Duplicate Remover software enables you to find and remove duplicate contacts, emails messages, appointments from one or more Outlook folders. Using the information in your Outlook account, you can delete the duplicates permanently, mark them as expire, move to Deleted Items folder, flag them up, copy to folder and move to another sub folder. Software to remove duplicate contacts supports MS Outlook 2000 and all above versions. Its also available in free evaluation copy with which user can examine its potency.
