Backup All Outlook Contacts to VCard in 3 Easy Steps
For some reason, the Microsoft Outlook developers never really embraced the vCard format, and did not provide adequate ways to import/export to this format. The ” File > Import and Export…” menu only has ways to import vCards, and no options to export them. (That’s at least true in Outlook 2003, I can’t speak for Outlook 2007.) Because of this, various tools and add-ins have appeared that allow you to backup/export your Outlook contacts to vCard, and some of them even cost money! Why should you have to pay to back up your contacts?
Well, you don’t. It turns out there is an easy (but non-obvious) way to do this in Outlook 2003 without any additional tools or add-ins. Here it is in 3 easy steps:
STEP 1: Select all contacts in your Outlook contact folder (CTRL-A).
STEP 2: Select “Forward as vCard” from the Actions menu.
STEP 3: When the new message appears with all of your vCards attached, select File > Save Attachments and save your vCards to a folder on your hard drive.
The draft message can be deleted/discarded. You now have a standard set of vCards that you can use however you like. You can even drag them onto your iPod Contacts folder and view them on the go from the iPod Extras>Contacts menu.
UPDATE Nov 2009 — WARNING: When Outlook exports to vCards, it only exports the first email address! The other email addresses will be lost! (at least in OL2003, I haven’t confirmed this for OL2007) You can see some discussion of this here.
May 28, 2009 - 12:07 am
If you have a phone that can’t be syncronised with your outlook contacts or you just don’t want to bother with the installation, you can send this email to the phone and click on the atachment. The phone will ask you if you want to add this contact to the address book. Since there are many VCF files it’s probably better to join them into single VCF file before sending. Just follow the 3 steps above and then open DOS window in that directory and type this command:
copy *.vcf contacts.vcf
Copy command will join every VCF file into a single file called contacts.vcf.
When I tried this on some sony Ericsson phones, the phone filled the whole address book with one click.
May 28, 2009 - 6:53 am
Miha – Thanks for the great suggestion! I’ll have to try this out.
-Carl
July 4, 2009 - 5:28 pm
Works with Outlook 2007 too.
July 8, 2009 - 1:12 pm
Jan – Thanks for the report, glad to hear it works on OL2007!
-Carl
October 19, 2009 - 11:41 am
The easiest way to do this is to download Mozilla Thundebird (http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/) and install it on your Vista OS. you don’t need to set up any account. once you have installed it. open up the address book and then select all the address’s and choose export. Select the LDIF format. Once this is done, copy this on a USB file and move the .LDIF file to your Mac. Now open up ‘Address Book’ within Mac and choose ‘import’ and navigate to the .ldif file and BAAMMM!! you are done. you should have all of your contacts in your Mac address book.
Now if you have an iPhone and MobileMe, enable syncing and make sure you have your address book option checked. doing this will add all of your contacts to your iPhone as well.