export contacts by category

D

dprawel

I can't find how to export only a specific category of contacts, e.g. Family,
to an Excel file. I've read all the posts and help. Custom views is fine for
print, mail merge, etc. but doesn't appear to be able to "export" what you
see in the custom views to Excel. Cut/paste is a kludge, but at least gets
the data there, if you don't mind lots of manual cleanup (only realistic if
you have only very a few contacts).

I have hundreds of contacts in dozens of categories. Many contacts have
multiple categories, e.g. Family and Holiday Card. In the end, the
File->Export function seems to be the tool MS made for this, but it only
exports ALL contacts in a folder, with no filtering (by category or anything
else it seems), other than selecting specific fields of course. I switched to
multiple folders of contacts years ago for this reason, but switched back to
a single Contacts folder with multiple categories for many reasons probably
well known to all.

And when I File->Export the categories (as one of the specific fields), I
get all categories in a single Excel column - NOT SORTABLE.

Any ideas?
 
R

Roady [MVP]

In addition to Michael's answer;

Method 1:
Customize your view to what you want it exactly to be and then
select-all/copy/paste it to Excel. No cleanup needed.

Method 2:
Export everything to Excel and then use the filter function in Excel to only
display items containing the word (category) of your choice.
 
R

Roady [MVP]

Thanks! It's funny to see how many different solutions we came up with in
this thread :)
 
D

dprawel

Copy/paste doesn't do the job, unless I'm missing your suggestion. As I
explained in my post, when you create a view you get rows, each with a field,
including field name, such as the following:
Full Name: Kevin xxxxx
Job Title: Office of xxxxxx
Company: Dept of xxxxxx
Bus: (703) abc-defg
Mobile: (410) abc-defg
E-mail: (e-mail address removed)
Categories: CIC speaker, End User, Interop

I have hundreds of these, most with multiple categories. When I paste I get
exactly this info, in rows in Excel. It takes a lot of manual transposing and
cleaning up to get it in column format to sort and arrange many at once. I
need to remove the field names, and multiple categories are semi-colon
separated but are contained in the same cell so they can't be sorted on.

Export to Excel and filter: Good idea. Thanks. For the sake of anyone
reading this (it's a popular topic!) "Find & Select:" in Excel gives
highlighted occurrences of the category fields I want, but then to get only
all the records which contain the particular category of interest I used
Filter->Text Filter->contains…

In the end, what a kludge all this is!! If only the export function could
export a category. I can't imagine I'm the only person who needs to do this.
From reading the many related posts over the years in these forums, this is
definitely an area that needs improvement. Seems an easy request. I will
suggest an enhancement.

Thanks Michael. And thanks Robert for your thoughtful ideas. Cheers.
 
P

PaintedLady

I am reading this and still cannot figure out how to do this. I have the
same issue of wanting to export specific distribution lists to an excel
spreadsheet. I have almost 4000 names in my Outlook contact list. This post
was originally written 2 years ago. I can't believe there still isn't a
simple way to do this!

Michal said:
Hi,

You can use CodeTwo Outlook Export freeware to do that. Group your view "by
category", then select category groups you want to export and click the
"Outlook Export" icon in the Outlook toolbar.

You can download Outlook Export here:
http://www.codetwo.com/pages/freeware/outlook_export.php

--
Best regards,
Michal [Microsoft Outlook MVP]

http://www.codetwo.com
Share Outlook on the net without Exchange!

I can't find how to export only a specific category of contacts, e.g. Family,
to an Excel file. I've read all the posts and help. Custom views is fine for
print, mail merge, etc. but doesn't appear to be able to "export" what you
see in the custom views to Excel. Cut/paste is a kludge, but at least gets
the data there, if you don't mind lots of manual cleanup (only realistic if
you have only very a few contacts).

I have hundreds of contacts in dozens of categories. Many contacts have
multiple categories, e.g. Family and Holiday Card. In the end, the
File->Export function seems to be the tool MS made for this, but it only
exports ALL contacts in a folder, with no filtering (by category or anything
else it seems), other than selecting specific fields of course. I switched to
multiple folders of contacts years ago for this reason, but switched back to
a single Contacts folder with multiple categories for many reasons probably
well known to all.

And when I File->Export the categories (as one of the specific fields), I
get all categories in a single Excel column - NOT SORTABLE.

Any ideas?
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
R

Russ Valentine

There isn't and never will be. Distribution Lists are a deprecated feature
that were never robust to begin with. If you want that data in an Excel
file, then just save the DL as a text file and open it in Excel. That's not
all that hard, is it?
--
Russ Valentine
PaintedLady said:
I am reading this and still cannot figure out how to do this. I have the
same issue of wanting to export specific distribution lists to an excel
spreadsheet. I have almost 4000 names in my Outlook contact list. This
post
was originally written 2 years ago. I can't believe there still isn't a
simple way to do this!

Michal said:
Hi,

You can use CodeTwo Outlook Export freeware to do that. Group your view
"by
category", then select category groups you want to export and click the
"Outlook Export" icon in the Outlook toolbar.

You can download Outlook Export here:
http://www.codetwo.com/pages/freeware/outlook_export.php

--
Best regards,
Michal [Microsoft Outlook MVP]

http://www.codetwo.com
Share Outlook on the net without Exchange!

I can't find how to export only a specific category of contacts, e.g.
Family,
to an Excel file. I've read all the posts and help. Custom views is
fine for
print, mail merge, etc. but doesn't appear to be able to "export" what
you
see in the custom views to Excel. Cut/paste is a kludge, but at least
gets
the data there, if you don't mind lots of manual cleanup (only
realistic if
you have only very a few contacts).

I have hundreds of contacts in dozens of categories. Many contacts have
multiple categories, e.g. Family and Holiday Card. In the end, the
File->Export function seems to be the tool MS made for this, but it
only
exports ALL contacts in a folder, with no filtering (by category or
anything
else it seems), other than selecting specific fields of course. I
switched to
multiple folders of contacts years ago for this reason, but switched
back to
a single Contacts folder with multiple categories for many reasons
probably
well known to all.

And when I File->Export the categories (as one of the specific fields),
I
get all categories in a single Excel column - NOT SORTABLE.

Any ideas?
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 

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