Importing WAB addressbook with hierarchical folders

[Anteaus]

As the title says, one user has multiple hierarchical folders in a Windows
Address Book (.WAB) file, and so far it's proved impossible to import these
into Outlook 2003. All the import utility will do is to import the toplevel
folder into Contacts, omitting the rest.

The user needs this addressbook in its present format since it lists the
contacts for each client/job in a logical manner. Re-creating it by hand
would be a very lengthy process. That is, if it's even possible as I can't
find any way to create a tree of subfolders in Contacts, it seems to be a
flatfile only.

Any suggestions?

 

[Roady [MVP]]

Once you imported the wab-file you can assign categories to the contacts.
This will give you much more sorting flexibility than sorting by folders.

 

[Anteaus]

Except, the problem is more fundamental in that Outlook refuses to import
anything below the toplevel folder.

I suppose I could 'flatten' a copy of the .wab into one folder for import
purposes, but that would leave the task of sorting-out the imported entries
back into categories, which in view of the size of the addressbook hardly
bears thinking about.

 

[Brian Tillman]

Except, the problem is more fundamental in that Outlook refuses to
import anything below the toplevel folder.

That's correct. You need to either flatten the heirarchy, as you say, or
move your subgroups around to the top level temporarily to import them.

 

[Anteaus]

Thanks. At least that confirms what I suspected.

 

[Anteaus]

I tried this approach, but after repeated attempts it seems to be
near-impossible to achieve success. A key problem is that anything imported
is immediately alphabetised, mixing it with the existing entries. Thus you
have no way of assigning a category to an import; by the time you could do
do, it's already mixed-in and inseparable.

I wanted to try an alternative, which is to export the .wab to a .pab.
(Exchange Personal Address Book, as used by earlier Outlook versions) I seem
to recall from Outlook 98 days that the export does work properly when done
this way round.

The issue with Outlook 2003 though, is that the .pab, when added to
Outlook, doesn't appear on the folder-list, thus there is no way it can be
accessed. I'm thinking this is a bug. Or is there something I need to do
(other than just adding it to the Outlook data files) to make it visible in
the folder-list?

Any ideas?

 

[Roady [MVP]]

It will not show in the folder list only in your Address Book.



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[Brian Tillman]

I tried this approach, but after repeated attempts it seems to be
near-impossible to achieve success. A key problem is that anything
imported is immediately alphabetised, mixing it with the existing
entries.

Start by creating a temporary subfolder in OE and move your main contacts to
that subfolder. Then copy the contents of one of the other subfolders to
the main folder. Import them with Outlook and categorize them (displaying
the Contacts folder in the By Category view will help here). Delete the
main folder contents in OE and copy up another subfolder. Repeat as needed.
Finally, move the contents of the temp folder back to the main and import
those contacts.

 

[Anteaus]

I figured-out a similar approach, and succeeded in importing the contacts
into a second Outlook data file. In fact, it turns out that it IS possible to
create subfolders, just that the method is not obvious.

Only thing is, doing this for computer alone took some very hard and
painstaking graft, in fact it occupied the best part of a morning, in between
support calls. Hopefully won't have to do this on too many!

Thanks for help, everyone who contributed.

 

[Roady [MVP]]

You can create subfolders for Contacts in Outlook, no problem there.
However, you wanted to do it at import time directly from a WAB. That is not
possible. Also, I wouldn't recommend to create subfolders in Contacts unless
you have a very specific need to do so. General sorting purposes is not such
a need. You should use categories and custom views for that.



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[Anteaus]

You can create subfolders for Contacts in Outlook, no problem there.
However, you wanted to do it at import time directly from a WAB. That is not
possible. Also, I wouldn't recommend to create subfolders in Contacts unless
you have a very specific need to do so. General sorting purposes is not such
a need. You should use categories and custom views for that.

Unfortunately, no. If the contacts in an OE folder have no common element,
such as a common company, domain or whatever field, then this will not work.

In replacing folders with 'Categories' the Outlook coders have made the
assumption that 'All contacts (which would be) in a given folder will have at
least one identical data-field.' In fact, this is a special-case condition
which would rarely apply in practice.