Importing additional contact info (appending), attaching items to contacts

[faddat]

Hello, I have a few general-purpose outlook questions for the folks on
this group. First of all, I would like to know if there is a way to
access outlook data in a "flat" form. I would like to append notes to
about 3000 contacts that I currently have in a Public Contacts Folder,
and I am not sure how I can actually append the notes to the contact
records, instead of re-creating the contact records. Any clues?

Second, we have had some trouble with the "activities view" on
contacts. Could anyone here explain how it might be configured for
best use? What I am thinking right now is to have each person in the
office set the activities view to check the calendar, task list, et
cetera of their co-workers. Is there a way to configure the activities
view globally for one folder?

Thanks!
-Jake
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

1) If you mean notes in the large item body control, you will need to open each item and type your new text in it.

2) There is little in the way of best use for the Activities tab in a public contacts folder, since it can show only one folder's activities at a time.
--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

 

[faddat]

First of all, *THANK YOU!* Your help is greatly appreciated.

Sue, I do mean the usual notes field used in Outlook for a contact.
What I have been doing so far is copy/pasting the entries from our old
database (in excel format) into Outlook, and I had been hoping that
there was some way to match up names to contacts and map those notes
directly to that field. Are we talking about the same thing? If so,
what you're saying is that I should just slow down a bit and get those
notes in?

Are you or anyone else aware of a utility that would let me get these
notes into Outlook? I used the import/export built into outlook and
was able to map *one* field to the notes field. If I can somehow
import more contacts on top of the ones we have in without creating
duplicates, I should be able to get the notes in.

Thanks again !

-Jake

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Yes, I mean the usual notes field. If you want to add data to existing contacts, you'll need to enter it into each contact, one at a time. If, however, you want to add new contacts, you can use File | Import and Export.

Contact utilities are listed at http://www.slipstick.com/addins/contacts.htm

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers