‘Access’-ing the Contacts Folder
If you use the Contacts folder extensively in Outlook you may find that it
gets out of control from time to time. Maybe the same email is attributed to
different people? Perhaps individuals in the same company at the same office
have different addresses? Cleaning up your problems with contact information
depends mostly on finding the problems in the first place.
You can work with Views > Customize in Outlook to specify a filter or filters
which can hide or show contacts based on many different criteria. Filters are
somewhat limited however.
If you are familiar with Access and/or SQL, a much more powerful tool exists.
You can run queries against your Contacts folder. Not only can you search for
duplicate information within the folder, you can also join the Contacts table
with other sources of contact information like a company-wide database or even a
national telephone directory.
To view your Contacts folder in Access, go to File > Get External Data > Link
Tables…
In the dialog box below, you're given a number of files to choose from but in
fact, none of the file names matter. Instead, go to the bottom of the dialog box
where it says Files of Type and choose Outlook.
You’ll then have the option to choose which of your Outlook folders to link
to. Choose Contacts and you’re finished.
Careful, not ALL of the data in Contacts is made available in Access. Take a
look through the table to see if the information you want is accessible.
This is especially true if you want to try to link to other folders such
as Tasks or Journal. For some unknown reason, very little
information is available. In fact, not even start time and stop time is
available for Journal entries…
Now that your contact information is available in Access, you use the
Query Editor and even straight SQL to
sort out your contact information. Changes in Access do affect the Contacts
folder instantly so be careful with Update and Delete queries!
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