How to Export all contacts from outlook to vCard

MS Outlook is a leading desktop email client that not only used for sending and receiving emails but also for managing other useful information. With the help of Outlook, you can maintain your address book, store information about your contacts, and keep track of your meetings and appointments.

MS Outlook has been used in many organizations to store information about their employees to have immediate contact with them. This contact information is stored in the address book. Contacts in MS Outlook can be considered as a business card. MS Outlook uses these contact information for sending email, faxes, placing phone calls, arranging meetings etc. Sometimes a need arises to share this contacts information with other program or applications like Gmail, mobile phone application etc. At this time, you have to export these contact information into vCard format because this format is acceptable by most of the application, programs or devices.

MS Outlook has the capability to export contacts into a vCard format. Steps to export MS Outlook 2010 contacts into vCard format are shown below:

Step 1: open MS Outlook and Select contacts folder from the navigation pane.

Step 2: Select the contact that you want to export as vCard.

Step 3: Click file tab and choose save as option.

Step 4: Navigate to the folder where you want to save the vCard file. Choose the file type as vCard and click save

Step 5: You can View the vCard file in targeted folder where you saved it.

However, there is some limitation with MS Outlook:

It cannot export multiple contacts at the same time as a vCard file.
You have to export Outlook contacts one by one. This process consumes more time when there is large number of contacts are available.
Methods like forwarding contacts as attachment of email and then dragging –dropping vCard from attachments, provide an indirect way to export multiple or all contacts to the vCard file. This will also consume more time when your contacts are in large number and saved in the different folder structure.
One more limitation of dragging and dropping is that the contacts from email attachment create multiple vCard files i.e all contacts are not exported to a single vCard file.
Most technically sound people suggest that for having all contacts into a single vCard file you should first export all contacts into the .csv format. Then import .csv file to Gmail and from Gmail you will be able to export all contacts into a single vCard file. This method is very lengthy and not a used to method. Also, the vCard file so obtained is not so accurate in respect of information’s.

For exporting large number of contacts into a single vCard file that contain all information about contacts with the full accuracy you can use vCard magic. As this, the software provides immediate conversion even if your contacts are numerous and saved in a multiple folder structures.

Comments (3)

Murali Reddy

Exchange Expert

Commented: 2015-06-19

Just to add for multiple contacts---

Select All from contacts , drag and drop to a folder (windows folder). For importing, drag and drop from the windows folder to the contacts folder.

However, the exported messages in the method above, will be .msg extension. however, if you are looking only for outlook import/export, this method is quick and easy.

Paul Wilson

Author

Commented: 2015-06-22

I agree with your answer but here we are discussing about used to approach, that has been known to all. However, here we are dealing with vcard format.

Commented: 2015-06-23

I agree Paul, just to add to your topic, so it might help someone. :)