Export VCards From Outlook

So now you know the telemarketers but who are the rest of the callers. 

This is the first of a series of articles to sync information between Outlook and Asterisk.  The first is the export of VCards from Outlook. 

Outlook can easily export single vcards however, it doesn't do multiple at once.  Picture a 1000 contacts in your address book.  That's a little time…or 10 seconds with this macro.

Download this file vcfexportandcontactrename.zip and unzip it.  Open the text file, Ctrl-A (Select All) followed by Ctrl-C (Copy) to put the contents in the copy buffer.  Next, open Outlook and press Alt F11 to open the Macro editor.  Create a new module and Ctrl V (Paste) the copy buffer to the new module.  Name the module if you wish.

Why all the work rather than a simple export/import of the macro file.  Because, 2/3 of the email servers and clients out there now block script files (even inside zip files) and there's a good chance, someone you know will like what you did and ask you to email it to them…

You'll see three macros there. 2 are of importance.  The 2nd one listed ResavePABbyNameCompany is a cleanup of your naming to get consistent names on the "Display As".  I did this for my old PDA (Telus HTC P4000) such that I could see both the person's name and company without having to edit each one manually.

And finally, to the purpose of the article…the bulk export of all your vcards at once.  The macro Export_PAB_to_vcfs does exactly that.  It exports your entire address book to a series of vcards.

Configuration: First find the line in each macro starting with "MyFolder1" and configure it to your mailbox name.  It may be "Personal Folder".  This matches my exchange folder name.  Secondly, the location you export to.  Search for "myContactsVCard" and change it to the location of your choice. 

The caveat of this (or more specifically of Outlook) is that it only exports a version 2.1 of the vcard standard meaning it doesn't store the categories in the vcard – this may or may not be important to you.  If it is, 4Team's VSync may be for you.  I use it now because of it does category export (it's vcard version 3).  Identical function to this macro (albeit prettier interface, menu access – though that's possible with this macro too with 5 seconds of programming – and easily adjustable folder – again, possible with the macro with 5 minutes of programming)