Outlook 2000 Address Book Group Entries Get Scrambled/Truncated

S

Scott Thomas

Please Help.

This, on-going problem with the Outlook 2000 Addressbook running on
Win 98, has become the Scourge-of-the-Ages to me whenever I am tasked
with updating the companys address book.

What I do is create a master .pst on my computer of an updated
addressbook.

This addressbook has e-mail contacts and e-mail groups, with sets of
department adresses in the groups.

Example:

(Group) Accounting:
(Entries) (e-mail address removed)
(e-mail address removed)
(e-mail address removed)

When I create an email "group", I click new..group..then add the email
adresses to the group. I add them by typing them in the group window,
then the add button; not by selecting contacts from the main list to
drag into the Email Group. But I've tried both ways and get the same
problem.

The Problem is...

I copy the exported .pst to another workstation (all running Outlook
2000, updated, patched, on Win 98), and import that .pst into an empty
addressbook on a workstation.

When I import, the Groups loose many of the addresses I've recently
added. It does not loose the entry but actually brings it over
incomplete -- the first letter of the Name field comes across, and the
email address is left entirely blank.

When I try to edit the incomplete entry to correct it, strange things
happen, like there are invisible character codes in the fields. So I
have to delete the entry and re-create it.

It is as if Microsoft's import parsing program routines are completly
bugged when it comes to importing the contents of "Contact Groups".

I've researched this for 2 years and still, I must manually retype the
problem group entries for each workstation in my office. I have it
easy as I remember reading a post about some poor guy that had this
same problem with an office of 200+ workstations. And had to retype
entries for all of them.

It is really amazing that Microsoft could drop the ball on such a
simple import routine and have such sloppy programming that a basic
address names get truncated like its string parsing routine cannot
properly calculate the group entry and choppes it off after the first
letter of the name.

Its been fun re-trping these problematic entries over the years.....

But if anyone has any kind of answer to the problem I describe, Please
feel free to give your input.

Thank you,

Scott
 
S

Scott Thomas

"> --
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Author, Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
Coauthor, OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)


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Scott Thomas said:
Please Help.

Good idea and thank you for the reply.

The only problem I would have doing this is that each workstation has
email, drafts, sent mesages, and other entries I would need to
preserve. My task is to update the contacts/addressbook only, and
leave everything else intact.

What I'll try is export the workstation .pst then copy the new
addressbook .pst in, then import everything but the contacts into that
new copy. That sounds a little better than having to retype group
entries for each workstation.

If the bug is only within the group structure import/export, this
might work.

Thanks again.
 
D

Diane Poremsky [MVP]

do it like this: on the one workstation, create a new pst using file, new,
outlook data file. Copy the groups to it. File, close to close the pst. Copy
that pst to the workstations and move the entries to the existing psts on
the other machines. Using import/export is going to keep messing things up
for you and it's really not necessary.
 

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