Move data from Entourage to Outlook on a PC

Jan 12, '05 10:28:00AM

Contributed by: barryjaylevine

While most hints regarding Mac/PC coexistence deal with moving data -to- the Mac, here's one for moving your data -from- your Mac to a PC (which, unfortunately, some are forced to so).

The apps in question are EntourageX (and probably 2004 although I haven't tried it there) and Outlook (and Outlook Express) on the PC. The desire is to move your email and contacts from the Mac to the PC. If you deal with the email at the folder level, you'll have to figure out how to convert the .mbox format over to the .pst format used by Outlook. That's a royal PITA.

So the answer is to deal with the emails on that level - the emails themselves. Simply create folders in the Finder (not in Entourage) named in the appropriate manner (Inbox, Sent Mail, etc.) and drag the emails themselves from Entourage to that folder in the Finder. There may be some hiccups with 0 byte files if you attempt to drag all the emails at once so do a few dozen or so at a time. Once done, these files may be moved over to the PC and simply dropped into the Outlook app's Inbox (Sent Mail, etc.) folders. All attachments accompany the email. Downside: Some formatting of the emails is lost but the content is all there.

Moving the Contacts over is a matter of exporting from Entourage as teb-delimited text, then opening that file in Excel and resaving as CSV (comma-separated values). Take that ".csv" file over to the PC, launch Outlook, open the Addressbook (Contacts), and then "import" as "other" (which will permit you to choose the .csv file). It will be necessary to re-map one or more fields so all Entourage contacts data ends up in Outlook but there are checkboxes and dialogs that spring up to permit this before you "ok" the final import of the data. It might take a few imports until you get it all correct; delete the extra entries by sorting the addressbook by a field you know is empty in the "poorly imported" entries.

It takes some time to do all of the above but, if you need your data, this will save you having to scrounge for a payware script that might or might not work.

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one, and there may be easier methods, but this looks like it should work as described (I have moved the occasional message from Mail to Outlook on my work PC, using a similar method).]

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