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Gerry Van Der Bas

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Exporting Outlook Notes to CSV

When I export outlook notes to CSV files and open them in Excel the notes are not staying in the column and proper field.
They are being appended to the end of a list of contacts. (which is impossible to then recreate without tons of time)

I have well over 6000 contacts all with several lines of notes (in the open contact notes field) where I put the date of the event and usually some note, some event, etc.

The purpose of the excel is to sort them into particular groups, so that I as manager can monitor last contact on key accounts etc.

If someone knows an easy way to get these to line up correctly let me know.
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Brian B
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When you open them in Excel, all they being separated out into individual columns? In not, you may need to use the text to columns wizard to break them out properly.

Perhaps you can help show the problem by attaching a small sample of the CSV and a sample XLS or picture of how they are appearing in Excel.
By Outlook notes, do you mean NoteItem objects or something else?
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Gerry Van Der Bas

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Inside an Outlook contact there is a note section (an open whiteboard for notes)
Normally I use these to record contacts and various notes of the contacts.
It makes the entire client information more transportable so I can send to those I manage, and keep sort of a running record of items done and discussed etc.

So, that said, I found a plugin called CodeTwo Outlook Export that allowed me to export with characters limited to 256.

This allowed me to have at least the last 256 characters, which was acceptable for my current need, but not necessarily if I wanted to export to a file for record keeping, or another reason requiring a more complete history of these notes.

I believe it may be because these notes have carriage returns, perhaps other images, links or other things which for some reason is somehow not exporting. When you open a .csv file in excel (which is really the better way so you can see everything, sort, etc, and again transport mass info) you can see some of the notes inserted in their proper column but other notes pertaining to that contact were showing 50 rows down by themselves in individual records, and of course not showing any relation to the contact.

Since these are private files I could not post the document but I show in the attachment a small excerpt .jpg so you can see that in this case after 162 normal listings a series of notes which runs to about row 4200 before there are more correctly supported records. I presume these are overflows of the notes, but you could imagine the work involved in moving these to an appropriate field for each listing.  (and finding only by the notes which record they might apply to.) Really impractical. Anyway I have a bandaid now with the plugin, but would like to know if someone has a solution that can allow an export of ALL the information from within the notes window. (AGAIN of a contact)
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Helen Feddema
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No comment has been added to this question in more than 21 days, so it is now classified as abandoned.

I have recommended this question be closed as follows:

Accept: Helen_Feddema (https:#a41782975)

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