Understanding Multi-line Outlook Street Addresses
A complaint seen frequently is that when street address fields are exported from Outlook, the field is either not exported correctly and/or the field contains strange characters. This would particularly be the case if the data was exported to either a Microsoft Excel or Access file in Outlook ‘2010 or earlier or to a CSV file opened in Excel. As of Outlook ‘2013, Microsoft Access and Excel file types are no longer supported for either import or export.
The most important thing to remember regarding street addresses is that the street address is stored as a single field within Outlook which is also the way it is exported. When exporting the street address via the export wizard in Outlook to either Excel or Access, the entire field may not be visible giving the appearance of missing information. The reality is that the cell (in Excel) or field (in Access) simply needs to be expanded to show all the information.
The strange characters that are seen in Excel, for example, are any <CRLF> characters (carriage return/linefeed) contained in the street address used to separate the individual lines.
There is no way to export the multi-line address field as individual fields from within Outlook, these will have to be separated manually. If you include the Street 2 and Street 3 fields from any of the address groups, the fields will always export as empty fields. (All ContactGenie products with export functionality support exporting street address lines as separate fields (max 4 lines) per street address)
When importing a street address contained in multiple fields via the Outlook wizard, map each individual street address line (max 3 lines) to the corresponding street address lines in Outlook (i.e. Business Street, Business Street 2, Business Street 3). The Outlook import wizard will combine these fields and store them in the first Street Address field.
Finally, whenever importing a multiline street address field, it should always be mapped manually to the Outlook field street address. This way there is no chance of Outlook not parsing the information correctly and placing street address info in one of the other address fields such as city, state etc.
Category: Understanding Outlook
