Import Outlook Contact Information Into an Access Database

摘要

You may consider yourself a database expert and feel a bit vulnerable when working outside that environment. Fortunately, when Access is the database, you get a helping hand in the form of Office's familiar object models that tend to stick to the collections, objects, and properties format. That means it's easier than you might expect to expose another Office model from inside Access, even though you aren't familiar with the other Office application. For instance, if a client uses Outlook to maintain customer information, but you want to use Access to manipulate that data, you don't have to be an Outlook expert to succeed. Before you spend a lot of time developing specialized code, you should know that you can import Outlook data into Access using the user interface (versions 2000 and 2002). Choose Get External Data from the File menu, then select Import. Using the Files of Type control, specify the Outlook() option, and click on Import. Or, you might choose to link to Outlook contact items. Unfortunately, Outlook must be the system's default mail client. You could temporarily change the defaults, but that's a nuisance. Automating the task is simple enough, so you shouldn't have to switch back and forth between default settings. In this article, you'll learn how easy it is to expose the Outlook contact folder to import contact data into an Access table.