Help!
I keep my address book on my home computer and the one on my work computer synchronized so I can email anyone from either location (nothing fancy here – I just make sure I update the address in one if I update in the other). My problem is that the address book on my work computer has lost a lot of the addresses, and I need to get the addresses (probably about 1000 of them – so I’m not interested in retyping) from my home computer back onto my work computer.
Here are all the gory details:
On both computers, I use both Outlook 98 (for my personal mail) and Outlook Express 6 (for my work email). I set them up to share address books.
Following an upgrade that was performed on my Office 2000 (Outlook 2000 was not installed because last time I installed it it would not allow me to share address books, so I’m still running Outlook 98), the address book seems to have reverted to some MUCH earlier version of itself.
I’ve noticed several times in the past that, for some reason, simply exporting the addresses to a text file and then importing the text file into the address book always loses some of the addresses. This months PCWorld magazine just coincidentally talked about where the addresses for Outlook were stored, so I thought I could just copy it from my home computer and put it on my work computer.
Here is what I ran into.
On my home computer, there are several instances of the outlook.pst file (the one PCWorld says stores all the Outlook data). There is one in C:/WINDOWS/Application Data/Microsoft/Outlook, and then there is one in each of the files for the various user profiles (for example C:/WINDOWS/Profiles/Cynthia/Application Data/Microsoft/Outlook). The one that was not in a profile was huge (60,000KB) and those in the profiles were relatively small (2400KB), so I guessed that the big one had the current data (lots of addresses and messages).
On my work computer, I discovered a similar situation. One instance in Application Data, and one in each of the user profiles (I use only one profile on each computer, but there are a couple extra ones from when I was learning how to use the computer four years ago). So, in the C:/WINDOWS/Application Data/Microsoft/Outlook folder, I changed the name of of the outlook.pst file to outlookoriginal.pst, and imported the file copied from my home computer.
Well, that updated all the folder settings, (and imported my hundreds of unhandled personal emails into them), but the address book apparently remained unchanged.
Any guidance on what I should try next? Currently, I have deleted the new file from the work computer and reverted the original outlook.pst file to its correct name – so I’m back to running the hopelessly outdated address book.
Suggestions or insight will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
-cynthia
