More Outlook Problems...

manveruppd · 1 Nov 2006 at 13:44

I seem to have somehow acquired several different copies of my Contacts folder... indeed, several different copies of ALL my personal folders!

While a couple of these Contacts folder are completely empty and can therefore be safely ignored, the rest seem to be identical, and the only way to find out which is the correct/most recent one would be to painstakingly compare every single entry in there! :/
Isn't there some way to merge them all into one, getting it to keep the most recent version of each contact entry where there are duplicates? Hey, even if it kept them all as duplicates I wouldn't mind, as I could just delete them later! Better to have duplicate entries than duplicate folders!!
Less annoyingly, I can't seem to delete any of them, even the empty ones! WHen I right-click on them, Delete in the context menu is blanked out!

InsomniaCalls · 1 Nov 2006 at 14:16

scanpst.exe?

manveruppd · 1 Nov 2006 at 14:40

Ooh very nice! I'll give it a go! Hope it works with the 2005 beta (which I'm unininstalling and reverting to 03 as soon as I manage to fix these...)

SiHH · 1 Nov 2006 at 14:45

You need to remove the "Outlook address book" and re add it.. Seen this several times.

Tools / email accounts / view or change exisiting address books

manveruppd · 2 Nov 2006 at 10:51

Ah no, turns out scanpst isn't what I need: my address book hasn't duplicated itself, I just have several different .pst files: when I last reinstalled Windows, I tried to import my old .pst file to restore my Contacts, but for some reason (maybe because I had been using Outlook 2003 before) it didn't work properly, and created its own. After several efforts I got it to open my old contacts folder, but it seems to have both duplicated my contacts inside its new address book AND to have retained my old personal folders from the imported .pst file as well! I currently have 2 empty ones and the rest seem to be full, and I'm wondering if there's an easier way to find out which one Outlook is using as the "default" one (ie. the one that's most up-to-date) without going through every single one individually and comparing.

Then there's the harder part: once I've found out which the current one is, how do I know which .pst file it's linked to? How can I export/save/whatever it somewhere else and be able to distinguish it from all the other copies so I can safely nuke every other file in that directory and start again with a fresh install?

siloleth said:
You need to remove the "Outlook address book" and re add it.. Seen this several times.

Tools / email accounts / view or change exisiting address books

Yep, but as you saw from the screenie, I have 7 different copies of my personal folders