How do I clear out my entire contact list?

[Guest]

My employer just bought a BlackBerry and wanted to import her contacts into
it using Outlook. She currently stores all of her contacts in a Palm
application, so we attempted to export those into Excel and then import them
into Outlook from there. Something went terribly wrong, and her contact list
is now full of 750,000 black vcards. It seemed too many to delete without
freezing the computer, so I uninstalled the entire Microsoft Office 2003 and
then reinstalled it. Even so, all 750,000 blank contacts remain. How can I
get rid of this list so it doesn't continue to mess up Outlook?

 

[Karl Timmermans]

If you have 750,000 contacts then assume you are using O'2007 and originally
imported this data into Excel '2007.

Is the default Inbox Exch or a local Outlook PST file?

If this is in reference to a local Outlook PST file .......... you can do
the following:

#1 - Create a new PST file
#2 - Make it your "default"
#3 - Copy all data items (i.e. email etc but NOT Contacts) to this new
Default PST file from your original
#4 - If you don't care about any "valid" contacts in the old contacts
folder - close the old PST file - your new default contact folder will be
empty otherwise copy whatever contacts you want to save to the new contacts
folder and then close the old PST file

If it's Exch - suggest you see your Exch admin to create a new mailbox after
first saving all other important items.

From our experience, Outlook becomes a very, very unhappy camper when trying
to delete large numbers of anything from within a folder (doesn't take much
to get an <out of memory> error regardless of how well endowed the host
system is).

Karl
___________________________________________________
Karl Timmermans - The Claxton Group
ContactGenie - Importer 1.3 / DataPorter 2.0 / Exporter
"Power contact importers/exporters for MS Outlook '2000/2007"
http://www.contactgenie.com

 

[Brian Tillman]

My employer just bought a BlackBerry and wanted to import her
contacts into it using Outlook. She currently stores all of her
contacts in a Palm application, so we attempted to export those into
Excel and then import them into Outlook from there. Something went
terribly wrong, and her contact list is now full of 750,000 black
vcards. It seemed too many to delete without freezing the computer,
so I uninstalled the entire Microsoft Office 2003 and then
reinstalled it. Even so, all 750,000 blank contacts remain. How can I
get rid of this list so it doesn't continue to mess up Outlook?

Press CTRL-A to select all the contacts and press Delete to delete
everything.