Importing Your Outlook Address Book

you have a lot of your contacts in your Outlook Address book, you don’t need to type them all over again into ACT!. For a simple import, ACT! has a built-in wizard for importing the contacts from your Outlook address book into your ACT! database.

The most important thing to note is that you MUST HAVE a Manager or Administrator role in order to import data into your ACT! database.

File, Import…
Click Next> at the Welcome screen.
Change the File type to import to: Outlook
Click Next>, Next>
Select from Outlook Contacts or Exchange Contacts (if your Outlook is on an Exchange Server).
Leave options at the bottom of the screen unchecked. Just be aware that most likely all appointments, notes and journal entries will be imported to YOUR record, so it is probably best to NOT check any of these options. If you have maintained lots of notes on your contacts, you will need to perform a custom export and import (not covered here). Click Next>.
Accept the Contact Map that ACT! provides and click Next>.
Click Finish.
Tools, Database Maintenance, Check and Repair… Whenever you make these kinds of changes it is a good idea to perform database maintenance.

p.s. If you find that you have WAYYY too many Outlook contacts and you don’t want to import all of them into ACT!, you may want to export the contacts first to Excel and then clean them up before importing the list into ACT!. In addition, if you have maintained notes on your contacts in Outlook that you want imported into the Notes tab in ACT!, the only way to bring those notes in and associate them with the correct contact is to export the Adress Book to Excel first, clean up the file (removing all hard returns), and then importing into ACT!. This can be a tedious procedure.