Export Thunderbird contacts to Outlook

Posted on | April 8, 2010 | No Comments

I wanted to export my Thunderbird Contacts to Microsoft Outlook 2010 beta.

Jesus, if that wasn’t the most stressful export ever! Thunderbird can only export as CSV or tab separated – or LDAP.

Outlook says it can import from CSV and Tab separated, however it just crashes with mapping errors.

I tried dragging them from TB and then dragging into Contacts on Outlook, but that just resulted in a new empty contact, with an attachment of the email address in a text file. Helpful.

Anyway, I found this Thunderbird Addon that will export to vCard (The standard Address Card I feel) and then I could drag these into Outlook.

http://nic-nac-project.de/~kaosmos/morecols-en.html

However, Outlook feels the need to open each vCard as a new Contact screen, so you then have the joys of closing as many screens as you have contacts just imported. So it could be hundred and hundreds!

I do wonder if the designers of these software packages ever have to use this functionality. Perhaps they should.

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