Import Contacts From Excel Into Outlook

An interesting feature you might not know about is how to import contacts from an Excel spreadsheet into Outlook. This trick makes moving contacts between accounts, employees, or different pieces of software super easy.

Here’s our example contact list that we’ve set up in Excel.

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The key to importing is saving the list in the right format. Select Save As > CSV (Comma delimited). You must save your contact list as a .csv file to import it into Outlook.

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In Outlook, click on File > Open & Export > Import/Export > Import from another program or file > Next > Comma Separated Values > Next > Navigate to your file and import it.

When it asks you to select a Destination Folder, select your Contacts folder. You’re going to land here:

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Select Map Custom Fields. You’ll see that some of the headers have automatically mapped. If we open up the “Name” field, we see First Name and Last Name have successfully mapped over.

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For anything that doesn’t match up exactly, you can make sure that your information is going where you intended it to by dragging and dropping values where you want them mapped to within Outlook. For instance, what we labeled our “Landline” column is equivalent to what Outlook calls “Home phone numbers.” So we’ll drag it over here to “Home Phone.”