How to Export Office 365 Contacts Quick Overview Based on Case Study

Living in the era of cloud computing and web-based office suites, it is difficult to shy away from the cloud-based products. So it is not a tough decision anymore for organizations to choose Office 365. Among all the amazing services, Outlook can be termed as the star product. With its help, the overall business communication within and outside the organization have become effortless. However, some users face an issue while they attempt to export Office 365 contacts. Once we had a client who was suffering from the same issue. In this post, his experience during that time will be shared. Readers will also know how our solution helped him to overcome his query on how to export contacts from Office 365 to Outlook.

The Client’s Reason to Export Contacts from Microsoft O365 to Outlook

It was the time when the client has started using Office 365 for a few weeks only. One of the biggest tasks after subscribing to Office 365 was to save all contacts of the entire company and in Office 365. For that, their organization collected contacts from everyone’s old official emails and saved them in Office 365. Now the problem arrived when the client was about to go on a trip and copy some of the Office 365 contacts to the Outlook installed in his system.

As the area he would be visiting is a remote one, he was not sure about the availability of the Internet connection there. The client basically needed the contact numbers, so that he can call some of our important clients. At that point, he did not know how to move contacts from Office 365. So he decided to put up a query in an Office 365 forum. The query looked like this:

“Hello everyone! This is my first post to this forum. For the business purpose, we use Office 365 in our company and I use MS Outlook at home for personal use. Actually, I need to export some contacts from Office 365 account in order to transfer them to MS Outlook. Being a new user of Office 365, the migration technique is unknown to me. Can anyone tell me how to export contacts from Office 365 to Outlook easily? Any help would in this regard will be highly appreciated. Thanks in advance.”

How to Export Office 365 Contacts to Outlook

In reply to the query, he received some answers. While many people stated that they are facing the same issue, some people did come up with a solution to the problem. The solution was to use the manual method to migrate Address Book data from Office 365 to Outlook. According to this technique, he had to open his Office 365 Outlook account and click on People. Then all the contact entries appeared in a new tab. Then he clicked on Manage >> Export Contacts.

Then all of his Office 365 contacts got saved in CSV format. Then he transferred the file to his system. Later, he opened his Outlook and clicked on File >> Import and Export. Then he chose “Import from another program or file” and clicked on Next button. After that, he selected “Comma Separated Values (Windows)”>> Next. On the next page, he clicked on Browse and selected the CSV file. Then he clicked Next and Finish to import the CSV file into his Outlook account

Though he only wanted to export selected data from the address book, there was no such option. He even tried selecting some contacts individually and then export, but that option did not work. At this point, he became disappointed.

Did the Manual Method Solve the Client’s Issue

Unfortunately, the technique described by the fellow users in the forum failed to resolve his problem. According to that method, he was able to export all contacts to Outlook, but he wanted to export only the selected ones. Moreover, as he was new to Office 365, he struggled with the steps. He had to repetitively check the suggested guideline and then perform.

What Was His Next Step To Export Office 365 Contacts

Since the manual method was not able to resolve the problem, he looked for more solutions. He surfed the Internet and asked some of his friends who have technical expertise. He even tried some third-party applications, but none of them worked. Finally, he came to know about SysTools and contacted us.

We listened to his entire story and suggested to him an application named SysTools Office 365 Backup and Restore Solution. One of his friends also expressed his satisfaction with this utility. Using this application, he was finally able to export the contacts of his choice from Office 365 to Outlook. The demo version of the utility is also available which can be easily downloaded from the below link. Furthermore, it is easy to download the contact of every Office 365 plan into Outlook-supported format using the software.

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6 Steps to Export Office 365 Contacts to Outlook

1. 1. Setup software & input O365 credentials.
   2. Opt Office 365 Backup option.
   3. The subsequent window list out all mailboxes that are parts of the account. Choose mailboxes to move contacts from Office 365.
   4. Choose the destination folder of the file that is going to create & click Export to export contacts of O365.
   5. User will come across a new page where they have to Checkbox beside Contacts option.
   6. Click Start and within a short time, all the chosen contacts will be saved in the .pst file.

4 Steps to Import Contacts to Outlook 2019/2016/2013/2010

1. Open Import/Export Wizard in Outlook application.
2.  Opt the opt option Import from another program or file and click Next.
3. Afterward, choose Outlook Data File (.pst) and click on Next. 
4. Browse to your PST file and import the contacts of O365 to Outlook.

What Did the Client Like about this Utility

These are the features of this tool that he liked most:

1. ‘Easy-to-use’ and ‘easy-to-understand’ interface
2. Availability of Account Impersonation Option for admin
3. Date-based filtering option for selective export
4. Also, export O365 mails and calendar entries

Conclusion

How to export contacts from Office 365 to Outlook is a common query among the users. There exists a manual method to move contacts from Office 365. The main drawback of this method is that, it does not support selective contact export. For this reason, the method was of no use to our client. After failing to migrate contacts using some other utilities, he finally became successful using SysTools Backup solution for Microsoft Office 365. This helped him to move the contacts of my choice from Office 365 to Outlook.

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