By Joe Dolittle
Reader Joseph McAllister has been trying to import his contact list from Excel into Outlook. He read our guide, Moving contacts from Excel into Outlook, and did fine up to a point. Let's let him explain:
I have been trying to do this transfer of contacts for a long time and I found your tips on the Internet very helpful. All was going well until Figure F in your article. I chose the contact folder and then I keep getting a error message:
ODBC ERROR in Microsoft excel 97-2003 translator while opening a file to build a map field. Too many fields to map.
I have a lot of contacts (4000) to transfer to Outlook. I tried to even bring them over 100 at a time. The header fields that I am using are first name/ last name /Business/ street / state/ zip/ email/ phone. Please let me know if you have any advice.
Without Joe's spreadsheet (and we so don't wan't Joe's spreadsheet!) it's not easy to see exactly what's wrong. However, we did a little Web searching and found a discussion post that seemed to describe and answer a similar problem.
If, as the post implies, there's a problem with Excel named ranges, we like the idea of simply exporting everything to a CSV file and then trying to import that into Outlook.
Good luck!
