How to save an Outlook Contact Group
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A question that comes up frequently is “How can I export a contact group” or “I exported my contact folder and the contact group(s) are missing – why?”
Contact Groups (formerly known as Personal Distribution Lists) are not and can not be exported via the Outlook export wizard. An Outlook Contact Group is a special type of contact item that exists in a contact folder with a messageclass of “IPM.Distlist”.
The process of saving a Contact Group is by opening it and then using File –> SaveAs –> select .txt as the output file type and save the group. This will create a tab-delimited file which can then be opened in Excel or any text editor. There will be extraneous header lines which need to be removed and if your plan is to import this file on another Outlook system, you will need to add a header row.
A Contact Group can contain 3 different types of members
- one-off contacts (contacts not saved in any contact folder)
- contacts that are in any contact folder within the current profile
- global address list members if in an Exchange environment
One of the drawbacks in saving a Contact Group using the above is that when contacts residing in any contact folder are added to the group, Outlook uses the Email Display Name as the contact name which for most people will include the email address along with the name making this field useless as a contact name field for import purposes. In these cases, the names will need to be cleaned up.
Something else to note is that if a contact within a contact folder is deleted or moved which was a member of one or more contact groups, this contact will not be deleted from the contact group. Instead, it will become a one-off member of the contact group unless you open the contact group and update it.
The following is a short video showing the process of manually saving an Outlook contact group
An alternative to manually saving an Outlook Contact Group is using ContactGenie Outlook Export – Constant Contact Ed. which will not only cleanly export any Contact Group eliminating extraneous email addressed but also provides the ability to included extended contact information similar to exporting contacts on their own as long as the contact group member has not in some way be set as a one-off group member.
Category: Outlook - How To, Tutorial Videos
