I recently decided to sign up for Plaxo (still don’t know if that was a good idea). Plaxo is yet another social networking site that will take you away from doing real work :). After signing up, you can then sync your Outlook address book with the on-line Plaxo address book to have ‘in the clouds’ access anywhere. So I chose to do this and then when I went back to my Outlook contacts, wa la, I had two of everybody in there. Great.
Of course, I googled my problem and after sifting through many results, I found the below which worked like a charm. Many thanks and please go to Tech Recipe for graphics and the step-by-step instructions. Instructions without graphics are below.
Another way to find and eliminate duplicates is to export your contacts into a .csv file, open them in excel and do a sort by name. I like this method when I know I have several contacts with the same name, but with different information in them. It’s a bit easier for me to consolidate all the entries into one while looking at them in excel. When you’re finished, simply import them back into Outlook.
Directions
1. Open your Outlook contacts
2. Click View, mouse over Current View and select Phone List. This will create a list of all of your contacts in a column based view.
3. Right-click a column header and select Field Chooser from the resulting menu.
4. In the Field Chooser box, use the dropdown and select All Contact fields.
5. Select Created.
6. Drag Created to the Column Headers to add it to the list. Close the Field Chooser box.
7. Now click on the newly added column header (Created). This will sort all of your items by the date that they were added to your Contacts.
8. Scroll down to the first contact in the list that is to be deleted and select it.
9. Scroll down to the last contact that is to be deleted. Hold down the Shift key and select this contact. This will highlight all of the contacts that you are going to remove.
10. Press the Delete key. The duplicate contacts will be removed.
11. Click View, mouse over Current View and select the view you normally use for your contacts (such as Business Cards).
12. Your Contacts should not display any duplicates.