People new to import/export frequently pose a question to an Outlook group asking “How do I import from program “x”? The typical (and correct) response is “Look to see what formats does “program X” export to and select that”

For some reason, when Outlook is involved, far too many people seem to think that anything involving Outlook is an Outlook issue. What really needs to be understood is that the actual importing and exporting from any program is a defined process. The import/export functionality in Outlook has not changed since Outlook ‘2000 (or possibly Outlook ‘97) and deals with very specific kinds of data.

QuickPort v1.0.3 and DataPort v3.0.3 have been released to address an issue causing an Outlook termination error when importing into a contact folder using a custom form. As the documentation states for these programs, Microsoft Outlook (or more specifically the Outlook Object Model) is not used to perform any import/export activity. However, when Outlook is installed, the Outlook.exe is the component which returns the custom form 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.