Getting your information into Contact Manager

You've signed up for Microsoft Office Live Small Business, so you now have the tools that you need to take your business to the next level. Using Contact Manager, you can turn a simple contact list into an effective customer and sales management system.

But what about your existing contact lists? Do you have to dedicate days or even hours to retyping all of that contact information into Contact Manager? Of course not. If you use Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, Windows Internet Explorer 7, or Windows Internet Explorer 8 as your Web browser, importing your contacts into Contact Manager is quick and easy, and this article shows you how to get it done quickly.

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• How Contact Manager is organized

• Get your contact list into Office Excel

• Match your lists with Contact Manager

• Now, just copy and paste

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How Contact Manager is organized

When you use Contact Manager, you can view your contact information in many ways. However, underneath each view, Contact Manager is organized in a simple datasheet with rows and columns of information, similar to a Microsoft Office Access table or a Microsoft Office Excel worksheet. Take a look, for example, at the two images that follow. In the first, you see the standard view in Contact Manager, which is a preview of your business contacts. In the second, you see the same contacts as they appear in the datasheet view.

You can import your contacts into Contact Manager by simply copying them from one datasheet and pasting them into another. Getting that done takes just three steps.

1. Export your contact lists to an Office Excel worksheet.
2. Match the columns in your worksheet to the columns in Contact Manager and ensure that the required columns contain valid data.
3. Copy the contact data from your worksheet and paste it into Contact Manager.

The following sections show you how to do these steps, and provide tips and troubleshooting along the way.

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Get your contact list into Office Excel

If your contacts are in Microsoft Office Outlook, you can easily export a copy of them to an Excel worksheet. To accomplish this, do the following:

1. In Office Outlook, on the File menu, click Import and Export to launch the Import and Export Wizard.
2. Select the option Export to a file.
3. Select Microsoft Excel as the file type.

    Note   If you're using Outlook 2007, the file type will be Microsoft Excel 97-2003. This is correct and the file will work in Excel 2007.

4. Select the folder from which you want to export your data (such as the Contacts folder).
5. Select the file name and location where you want to save the exported file. You can click Browse to select a location, and then type a new file name.
6. On the final screen of the wizard, notice the Map Custom Fields button. You can click this button to select different fields to export for each contact. Or, to export all contact fields and edit them later, just click Finish.

If your contact list is stored in a different source program

The process of exporting your contacts from another contact management program is likely to be similar to the process described above for exporting contacts from Outlook. For example, if your contacts are in Office Access 2003, on the File menu, click Export for the option to save your contacts table to an Excel workbook. In Access 2007, the process is even simpler —on the External Data tab, in the Export group, click Excel.

If your source program doesn't include the option to export to an Excel file format, you can also export to a Comma Separated Values (CSV) format; the file should open in Excel, in worksheet format, as if it had been saved in an Excel file format. If your source program doesn't offer either an Excel or CSV format for export, try using a Tab Delimited or Tab Separated format.

A tab delimited/tab separated file is saved as a text file. To open a text file in Excel, in the File Open dialog box, select All Files from the list of file types available to view. You will then be able to access and open your text file, which will prompt the Excel Text Import Wizard to start. Follow the steps in this wizard for tab-delimited values.

 Tip   If you use a tab-delimited format, free-form fields containing multiple paragraphs of information (such as a notes field) may complicate the conversion between tab delimited text and Excel worksheet columns. If text from such fields appears to fall in the wrong place in your Excel worksheet, you may save time by filtering out those fields in the source program and trying the export again. Look for an option in the export process similar to Map Custom Fields, mentioned earlier as part of the Outlook Import and Export Wizard.

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Match your lists with Contact Manager

When you open your exported contact list in Excel, it will look similar to the datasheet in the following example.

The top row in the preceding worksheet image contains field names that are similar to the column headings shown in the Contact Manager datasheet in the next image.

To prepare your Excel worksheet data for copying into Contact Manager, the field names (column headings) must be consistent in both locations. You can use a different name for a field (for example, Company in your Excel worksheet can be Account in Contact Manager), but the columns must fall in the same order for the data to paste correctly. To do this, you can edit either the Excel worksheet or Contact Manager.

Match your Excel worksheet to your Contact Manager datasheet

If you're satisfied with the contact fields that appear in Contact Manager and the order in which they appear, you can edit your Excel worksheet to match.

• To delete a column from the Excel worksheet, right-click the column heading (the letter than appears at the top of the worksheet column), and then click Delete.
• To move a column in the Excel worksheet, right-click the column heading, and then click Cut. Then, right-click the column heading to the right of where you want to place your cut column, and then click Insert Cut Cells.

   Note   Using the paste command doesn't work in this case, as it will overwrite the selected column.

 Tip   If you're using Excel 2007, you can format your contact data as an Excel table in just two clicks, and then use the built-in table tools to reorganize your data even more easily.

Match Contact Manager to your Excel worksheet

Perhaps you like the way your existing contact list is organized. You want the same or similar columns, in the same order, to appear in Contact Manager. Easy. To customize your Contact Manager view, do the following:

1. In the View drop-down list, click a different view than the Preview view. For example, click By Companies. The view that you choose will be similar to the following illustration.

   

2. Click the View drop-down list again, and then click Modify this View.

   

3. On the Edit View page, you'll see a Columns section, as shown in the following image. That section lists more than 50 contact fields (Column Names) from which you can select.

   

4. In the Display column, select the check box that is next to the column name that you want to include.
5. Arrange the order of the columns in your datasheet by setting the Position from Left value for the selected column name. To move a column up in priority, select the new position number and all columns that follow it will automatically be renumbered.
6. When you're satisfied with the set of columns and their order, click OK at the top or bottom of the page.

A note about required and restricted columns

Regardless of how you go about matching columns in Excel and Contact Manager, it is important to note the following:

• The last name field is required. If any of the contacts in your Excel worksheet do not have text in this field, that contact will not be included when you paste your contact list into Contact Manager.
• For a few fields, such as the Company field, the value must match an entry in a drop-down list of options. In the case of the Company field, the drop-down list consists of the companies that you've added in Contact Manager. To add a new company, on the actions bar click New and then click Company. If you include the Company field in the contact list you import and the company name in a contact doesn't match an available entry, the company name is not added for that contact, but the contact will still be imported.

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Now, just copy and paste

After you have the same columns, in the same order, in both Contact Manager and your Excel worksheet, you can simply copy and paste the data. Here's how to get it done:

1. On the Contacts tab in Contact Manager, click Actions , and then click Edit in Datasheet. Your contact list in the datasheet view appears.
2. In Excel, select all data in your worksheet except for the top row of field names. Then, press CTRL+C to copy.
3. In Contact Manager, click to select the first empty cell in the first column of the Contacts datasheet. Then press CTRL+V to paste.

That's all there is to it. An exact copy of your contact list is now in Contact Manager.

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