If you create user-defined fields and only use these fields within Outlook itself, then this article will be of little or no interest. If, however, you need to (or at some point, think you will need to) share information between Outlook and an external data source, this article will cover some points that can potentially save many problems – specifically in terms of how field names are constructed.

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.

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 Outlook export wizard 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.

There are two sets of field names used by Outlook for standard fields – internal names and Display Names (used by the Field Chooser during custom form design and shown in the All Fields List when displaying detailed contact information).

The Display Names are based on the Microsoft Office language setting in use and change accordingly whereas the internal names always remain consistent. When information is exported from Outlook via the Outlook export wizard, the internal field names are used.