address book manipulation

[turnbulldw]

Hi,
This may have been asked but I did not find a lear answer anywhere so I
will ask again. Please accept my apologies if I am inadvertently
beating a dead horse.

My company is using Access 97 to populate Outlook 2003 personal address
books based on CSV's mined out of a point-of-sale solution. They will
not upgrade Access (too cheap) and they will not let me install the
Access-to-Outlook parts that we would need to mount the address book in
Access as a linked table (I think these are ODBC drivers but I am not
certain). So, I am left with opening the PAB using the Outlook Office
objects (Namespace, AddressList, AddressEntry, etc..) and running
through the csv data record by record and adding the entries into the
PAB one at a time.

This is fine but, to do this "safely" is very slow. I verify for each
line whether the address already exists and act accordingly whether it
does or does not. I would prefer to simply clean out the existing PAB
contents each time and replace them with the csv information. I have
to do this with VBA and, because it is an existing process, the users
have to use Access as they are accustomed to double clicking the mdb
file to perform the work.

Given that I am heavily constrained in the choices I can make here (I
would rather code this as an add-in to Outlook but it is not a choice
right now), what I need to do is to either a) drop the existing PAB and
re-create it prior to populating it or b) clean it out en-masse rather
than deleting entries one at a time. I have not found any object that
has these abilities. Would anyone out there be able and willing to
tell me if this is possible and, if so, what objects to use? If I can
find the right direction, I should be able to figure it out.

Thanks
-dt

 

[Eric Legault [MVP - Outlook]]

Have you tried the Import/Export Wizard in Outlook? It will allow you to
import from a .csv file and map the related columns to Contact fields.

 

[turnbulldw]

Thanks for the suggestion. I have used it personally but the process
that is in place is automated and I can not find how to programatically
manipulate the import/export wizard. From the end-users point of view,
this process is 1) pull in flat file from web 2) open Access database
and wait 3) send emails. The wizard requires that the users know which
address book to use and opens up the possibility that the import will
be put in the wrong place. Also, the code does do some data validation
that the wizard would not know anything about; business logic mostly.

Now, if there is a VB or VBA object that can use the import/export in
Outlook, that would be great. Something like the DoCmd.TransferText
statement does in Access.

-dt

 

[Eric Legault [MVP - Outlook]]

Unfortunately the Import/Export Wizard cannot be automated. Based on the
things you need to do, it's probably best to build a custom import process
anyway.