Difficulty importing EXCEL data into Outlook Contacts

[Robert Judge]

I want to take advantage of the Outllok 2003 feature that will trigger a
calendar event on the birthdays and anniversaries of my contacts.

I have a CSV file containing four columns (name, birth date, anniversary,
and death date (for some of the contacts)). I want to import this data into
Outlook 2003 Contacts, in order to trigger these calendar events (that is, to
get the pop-up reminder on the Contact's birthday and anniversary). I saved
the CSV file as an EXCEL 2003 file and I used the Outlook function to import
the data from EXCEL, as I have done successfully many times before. However,
when I import the data into Contacts, the birthdates all come over as "none"
even though the anniversary date comes over fine. The data in the EXCEL file
columns are formatted the same.

Two questions:
1. Why won't Outlook import the "birthdate" information from EXCEL but will
import the "anniversary" date?" In Outlook, those fields are identifical
except for their labels, aren't they? What EXCEL date formatting should I be
using?

2. Outlook appears to only two three Contact columns that are date fields:
birthday and anniversary. How can I bring over the third column of dates
(the death date) so that Outlook will treat that data as a date field too?

I will appreciate advice.