Understanding Outlook Home, Business, Other Mailing Address Fields
There are 3 sets of address fields that can be used when importing information in Outlook (Home, Business, Other). To use the Business Address as an example (everything applies equally to all 3 address groups), the fields applicable to that group are (field names are shown as Internal Outlook names followed by the Outlook Display Name as seen in the Field Chooser and/or <All Fields> collection). The <Mailing Address> is a different kind of address group which will be described separately.
+ BusinessAddress (Business Address)
- BusinessAddressStreet (Business Address Street)
- BusinessAddressCity (Business Address City)
- BusinessAddressState (Business Address State)
- BusinessAddressPostalCode (Business Address Postal Code)
- BusinessAddressCountry (Business Address Country)
The <BusinessAddress> field is preceded by a <+> sign in the import list is comprised of the component fields listed below it or to state this another way, the full Business Address field gets populated by the date in the component fields (<BusinessAddressPostOfficeBox> is not included as part of the full)
The completion of the BusinessAddress field is done automatically when entering data into the individual address fields or when data fields are mapped to the individual fields during the import process.
it is also possible to enter all the information directly into the <BusinessAddress> field (the big white box beside the Address button) via the Outlook user-interface or by mapping a field to the BusinessAddress during the import process. When this approach is used, the data is <parsed> and Outlook makes a best effort to determine what components belong in the individual address fields, a process that is prone to error and is very unreliable for anything but the simplest of addresses.
The Outlook import process does not prevent mapping fields to both the full address (BusinessAddress) as well as the individual component fields. However, doing that will lead to unpredictable results.
The format of the Full Address is governed by the value found in the Country field (i.e. <Street City State PostalCode Country> or <Street PostalCode City State Country> etc). If no country is entered, then the country value as defined in the regional settings is used when creating a new contact item. When the country value is changed on an existing contact item, the full address is not reformatted unless one of the individual address fields is also changed.
If a situation is encountered where there is a value contained in the full address field (i.e. BusinessAddress) but all the component fields are blank, then the cause is typically the result of a 3rd party process creating/updating the address information using a MAPI library instead of utilizing Outlook itself to update the contact item.
Mailing Address
The fourth address group in Outlook is the <Mailing Address> which unlike the other 3 groups does not have a direct correlation between the internal Outlook field name and its corresponding Display Name. The internal and display name fields for the Mailing Address group are
+ MailingAddress (Mailing Address)
- MailingAddressStreet (Street Address)
- MailingAddressCity (City)
- MailingAddressState (Prov/State)
- MailingAddressPostalCode (Postal Code)
- MailingAddressCountry (Country/Region)
The significant difference between the Mailing Address group and the other groups is that the Mailing Address represents one of the other 3 primary address groups. You cannot import or export any of these fields and the values contained in the various fields is determined by which of the 3 mailing addresses is set to be the default mailing address for the contact.
PO Box
There is a PO Box field for each of the 4 address groups but this field is not considered part of the primary group. In other words, in other programs such as MS Word doing a MailMerge, if you select the Business Address group, it will not include the Business Post Office Box field. The PO Box field must be selected separately.
Category: Understanding Outlook
