Importing contacts from the Windows version of Outlook puts all fields in quotation marks (311589)


The information in this article applies to:

  • Microsoft Entourage X
  • Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
  • Microsoft Outlook 2000, Service Release 1 (SR-1)
  • Microsoft Outlook 2002
This article was previously published under Q311589

SYMPTOMS

If you import contact data from the Microsoft Windows version of Microsoft Outlook 2000, of Microsoft Outlook 2002, or of Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 into Microsoft Entourage versions X or 2004 from a tab- or comma-delimited file, you may see:
  • Quotation marks around the text in each contact field at the mapping step of the import process.
  • Quotation marks around the text in each record in the imported contacts.
  • Text in the Notes area of the imported contacts, with quotation marks around field names, field data, or both.

WORKAROUND

To work around this issue, send the Outlook contacts as vCards in an e-mail message, open and save the vCards in Entourage, and then move the vCard attachments to the Entourage Address Book.

To send the contacts from Outlook 2002 or 2003, follow these steps:
  1. Click Contacts, and then click the contacts that you want to send as a vCard.
  2. On the Actions menu, click Forward as vCard.
  3. Enter the e-mail address of the Entourage account in the To box, and then click Send.
To open the e-mail message and save the vCards in Entourage X, follow these steps:
  1. Open the message.
  2. Click an attached vCard, and then click Open Attachment on the File menu.
  3. If a message asks you to confirm that you want to open the attached file, click Open.
  4. To save the vCard into the Address Book, click Save.
There is no interface to allow you to drag multiple contacts to the Address Book. To move multiple vCard attachments to the Address Book, follow these steps:
  1. To create a new folder, press COMMAND+SHIFT+N or click New Folder from the File menu on the Finder.
  2. In Entourage, click the e-mail item that has the vCard attachments.
  3. Click one attachment, and then press COMMAND+A to select all of the attachments.
  4. Drag the attachments to the new folder on the desktop. This action puts a copy of the vCards in the folder.
  5. In Entourage, click the Address Book navigation button.
  6. Go back to the new folder on the desktop, and then select all of the vCards.
  7. Drag the vCards from the folder to the Address Book contact list.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

MORE INFORMATION

For additional information about vCards, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

197026 OL2000: How to Use vCard in Outlook

If the contacts that are sent from Outlook arrive in Entourage as e-mail messages rather than as contacts, they were not forwarded as vCard attachments. Follow the steps in the Workaround section to correctly send vCard attachments.
Modification Type:MinorLast Reviewed:8/18/2005
Keywords:kbbug kbnofix KB311589
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