Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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Very few items cause my clients and friends as much distress as working with address books or contacts — here I differentiate from clients, who are generally larger organizations — but in both cases there are issues involved with acquiring and managing databases or lists of names, addresses, phone numbers and related info.

Why is this so hard?

Well let’s look at a typical scenario.

You load Office and do email, right-click on an address, and add it to Outlook contacts. That becomes your main address book.

(If you’re smart you read my update on Anagram, and you use a hot key to capture the entire bloc of contact information which is often appended to an email) Get the program here.

Okay, so you’ve begun getting your contacts in Outlook and it has become your default address book.

Suppose you’re in Vista? There is a desktop widget (unless you were smart enough to deep six it) named Contacts. That seems easy enough. Suppose you populate it with more contacts — is it connected to your Outlook contacts?

Well, no.

So you decide to continue with Outlook, but now you begin working with Access and you see its power.

Not only that, you look through the various templates and see that there’s one named Contacts, and you create it — just to check it out.

Figure 1

The first thing you notice on their site is the video wall — it does tend to grab your attention. The second thing is the word “search.”

What this does for you is create a Contacts table with a set of forms already linked from which you can generate queries and reports (hard to do in Outlook).

Figure 2

But if you read my original article on Outlook and are familiar with exporting file formats as CSV you can easily export a text file from Outlook and import it into Access.

You should even be able to append them to existing Contacts table that Access created...

Figure 3

You will need to go through the import wizard and tell Access that the first row of the file contains the field names, etc.

Figure 4

Whoops — our first incongruity — the fields don’t match and we have an error.

Figure 5

There’s a lot of steps we could take, but the easiest is just to import it as a separate table into Access, either into this database or another one.

I won’t go over all of the steps here — we’ll save that for an update devoted to Access 2007, but it ain’t pretty.

Access asked a whole lot of questions and created not one simple table, but several tables linked with look-ups.

Figure 6

To see the complexity, just look at the Relationships.

Figure 7

We may want to sort through this confusion at some point but we realize we’re in over our heads here, so we decide that Access may not be the right tool at the moment.

For one thing, we’re going to want to merge some of this data into a Word document or Email message, so multiple tables will be a problem down the road.

(We may be able to create one simple table, but maybe we’ll do that when we’re not busy and have time to really figure it out. Like never).

Besides, the local contact list/address book is just the beginning. Since we’ve got our Contact list exported as a CSV file from Outlook, we decide that we want to use it online.

We’ve decided on Google Mail and its Contacts list. It could have been Hotmail or Yahoo, or any other PIM or cell phone that takes CSV files.

Generally any of these programs have a simple Import and Export utility and they anticipate imports from Outlook as CVS.

Google is waiting and willing. We can easily import the file...

Figure 8

And we now have our contacts on Google — Contacts. We can use its web mail to send email and find our info anywhere with a browser.

Figure 9

So we proceed merrily adding contacts to our Google list but eventually we want them back in Outlook.

So now we download the Google list to our computer choosing the correct export option — to Outlook.

Figure 10

We shouldn’t have to go through a mapping of fields process because the CSV should have the correct Outlook fields.

Figure 11

Now we can have an updated list in Outlook.

(We did not show a step where we selected not to create duplicates — we overwrote any duplicates with the new info).

Figure 12

A very nice thing happened. By adding the contacts back into Outlook, the import wizard was smart enough to parse the first and last names for us!

Take a look at the preview after selecting the Outlook contacts as a data source for a mail merge.

Figure 13

Now we can create a greeting like Dear Alan, instead of Dear First + Lastname.

Figure 14

Interestingly enough we had tried to use just the downloaded CSV file from Google as the source for our Mail Merge, here’s what would have happened in the Mail Merge Wizard — the first and last names would be combined.

Figure 15

The Google exported file had a single Name field which combined first and last names — not useful for a mail merge greeting.

What else might we have done?

Oh no! Not another Contacts option — this figure shows the Google data in an Excel List.

Excel would have allowed us to make additional refinements to the list, by moving the Last Names into a distinct field.

Excel also lets us view it in a Form — we covered that in a previous update as well.

Figure 16

So you could also use Excel as another Contacts list, if you wanted to drive yourself crazy.

That’s the problem with Microsoft sometimes — many many options and it is hard to sort through them all and make a decision as to which is the best solution.

Ultimately, while you can use a label wizard and do mail merges with Access, for many simple tasks it appears that keeping your address book in Outlook and doing occasional imports and exports with PIMs and online programs is the easiest way to go.

What about synchronization with PIMs and online programs? It’s nice when it works but as soon as Outlook upgrades to a new version it gets challenging for these programs to keep up.

At some point, if you need the ability to store disparate information in related tables and do complex queries, you may want to revisit Access. We’ll try to do it soon and solve some of the issues we encountered.

InformIT Articles and Sample Chapters

Access 2002: Touring the Contact Management Application

Filtering Your Outlook Contacts

Books and eBooks

Office 2007 Bible (Safari Books Online)

Office 2007: The Missing Manual (Safari Books Online)

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