Comments on: Convert AOL Address Book to Outlook

By: Marc

Marc — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 05:36:09 +0000

This is a bit cumbersome, but it's how I got my Dad to kick the AOL habit and export his AOL 6.0 address book.

1. Go to AOL.com, login and open your address book.

2. Since the list in the window is HTML it can be viewed as a text file by right-clicking on "View Source"

3. Save or copy the part of the source code with the names and addresses in it to a .txt file.

4. I then cleaned up the file in WORD by doing a search and replace on most of the non-data characters. (Hint: Use the "View Hidden Characters" option in Word).

5. Save that file and re-import it into Excel. Excel will then give you nice choices on making the file into nice neat columns.

6. Clean up the Excel file and re-save.

7. Import the Excel file into Outlook using the Import function.

It's not easy, and it's not perfect, but it's free, and works pretty well.

Good luck.

By: Jim

Jim — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 22:03:02 +0000

Have you tried ePreserver? It can convert your AOL email, address book, and favorites places to Outlook or Outlook Express all at once without having to figure out how to install the Java Runtime system. ePreserver even supports AOL 8 and 9. It is, however, commercial software.

http://www.connectedsw.com/Overview/57266

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 19 May 2004 19:54:25 +0000

Thanks for repeating the above, Andrew. Nice work, sir. Again, this will only work if you're using AOL version 7 or below. That's been stated here several times and is included in the post above several months ago. Gracias.

By: Andrew Dennison

Andrew Dennison — Wed, 19 May 2004 18:56:33 +0000

Kevin this is from http://www.aoleave.com/addbook.html

"To use the Address Book tool you must save your Address Book from the AOL interface."

By: Kevin

Kevin — Sun, 16 May 2004 18:29:34 +0000

Reading is fundamental, Chris. The instructions are for versions 6 & 7, not versions 8 or 9.

For more recent versions of AOL, you can "SYNC" your address book easily between Outlook, Outlook Express and several other tools. For complete instructions, AOL Keyword "sync" or check this AOL help page.

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 16 May 2004 18:06:20 +0000

Kevin,

Your help does not take us anywhere, because there is no SAVE option in AOL any more, and it is a required step in AOLeave.com's procedure.

By: Stu

Stu — Tue, 04 May 2004 04:18:20 +0000

Well this is a nice answer, but my client uses aol 8 that doesn't have the save feature. I am going to create the Generic printer with the port set to FILE. So when I "Print" the dumb list it will go to a text file that i will edit to Comma seperated values, CSV for input into outlook… more work but get's the job done…

By: chris

chris — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 22:18:47 +0000

I tried doing this but there is no option to save the address book on AOL 8.0. Am I missing something?

Thanks.

By: Michelle

Michelle — Tue, 16 Mar 2004 01:56:25 +0000

I know I'll be back to look for this post. We've helped so many friends and family members off of AOL and they always panic about losing their addresses. I think we have emailed them over in the past.

Some people need AOL, tho. They just do.

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By: Michelle

Michelle — Tue, 16 Mar 2004 01:55:52 +0000

Some people need AOL, tho. They just do.