Microsoft Outlook export options – absent

I’ve to use Microsoft Outlook 2007 at work and one of the most irritating things about Outlook is it’s inability to export information. There’s like no flexibility to get information out of it.

Outlook has a great ability to store information and be a contact center piece, but damn if it isn’t hard getting stuff out of it.

There should be more options…

As a standard there should be an export option to every window; whatever your looking at, you should be able to export this to a CSV file or something compatible with something else.

Take for instance doing an advanced search in Outlook; you can do an advanced search in Outlook to try to find what your looking for, and saying you do, now what can you do with it… NOTHING.

The file menu here offers no export option. When you right-click on an item or a group of items there’s no export options; not even a copy option.

Now, while you can’t right-click and copy, there is the ability to CTRL-C and copy form there, but if you paste it in Outlook it’s links/attachments, if you paste it in to Notepad/Wordpad it’s text.

Funny how that works.

And one of my biggest deals with programs that want to store, or keep, information for you is, once it’s in the program, how do you get it out? Can you get it out? If you can, is it compatible or easy to work with once it’s exported; this is where I think Microsoft Outlook fails.

Since I’ve to export or get information out of Outlook regularly, this is a point of friction for me,but I found this little freeware program that helps me quite a bit; it’s called ‘CodeTwo Outlook Export’.

The beauty of this program/plug-in is that it adds a toolbar icon to Outlook and you can export/filter information to a CSV file and once exported, it’s more usable.

For Outlook to be such a ‘bionic’ contact manager, it lacks some serious common sense functions.

From the contacts window, there’s not even a way to select multiple contacts and export those to a file; you can’t even select all the contacts and create a group/distribution, send email or option to print label/envelope- these things are completely obvious natural functions and completely missing. You can do it from outside the program, but not in it [not easily].

I hope this helps someone.

Thanks for reading!

Enjoy.