TBird won't import one of three phonedbooks from Outlook

richardmitnick · 24th May 2008

I just installed TBird on a second computer. Everything went fine except that one out of three of my PhoneBooks did not import.

I tried several times, all I got was additional copies of the others.

I have the phonebook also in an excel file, but TBird seems to have no way to deal with that.

I very much need to get this phonebook into TBird and it is too large to do manually.

Any help?

Thanks,

>>RSM

**Westside** · 24th May 2008

Just phone books? Without addresses. I never had Outlook, so the entire thing does not ring any bells. What format is the phonebook? And, what about the others.
FYI, I had been able to import address files, which had also phone numbers, in ldif, txt, csv formats. However very large (like over 1000 addresses) address books did not so well.
Try to use Dawn to convert to an importable format.
Doing a search I got a lot of hits for your issue.

richardmitnick · 24th May 2008

Hey Westside-

So, how is the weather in your area?

Actually, I did solve the problem, I had forgotten that TBird could import .csv files. It's messy, with that box where you need to line up the categories, but it does work.

Actually, the biggie, with 3000 contacts I use at work, that it imported like duck soup. And my Personal Address book, and my email phone book. It just missed my Money Chasing book, which is a few hundred contacts, and the .csv file from Outlook worked fine.

I have moved to TBird because Outlook 2007is slowly dying on my two Vista computers. First symptom, a data file needs to be checked. Next symptom, a "Reminder" could not be read. I have no reminders. I do have too much mail stored. So I spiffied that up, then exported it all to TBird, and deleted all of my mail folders in Outlook. The thing about Contact folders in Outlook, you can print really neat books on paper with many contacts per page. So, I don't want the program to become useless. I do not need it for mail, TBird does fine with mail.

Actually, I posted also at Mozillazine, and Daifne there gave me a link to what looks like a really nice extension for contacts in TBird. If I install it, and if I like it, I will post about it.

Be well, stay dry, go out and play.

>>RSM

richardmitnick · 24th May 2008

Hey Westside,

Here is the link, I have not done anything with it.

https://nic-nac-project.org/~kaosmos/morecols-en.html

>>RSM

**Westside** · 24th May 2008

Richard,
I corrected the file format which you used. It goes to show you that I have not had the occasion of using that format.
I am sure that the what is different in TB is a shock, as it is different. But, you can do as much as you want. I don't know what is the problem lining up the categories. For me it is enough to select Home and Work phone for each address. More details are in the individual cards.
I don't think that there is obvious difference between the Address Biooks of the old Netscape7.x, or Seamonkey, and Thunderbird.
After my fiasco with AOL Gecko, I found more practical to have several small address book, rather than one humongous one. It is in the same category of store e-mail back to the last century in a single folder, i.e. the Inbox.
I forgot the weather. It looks like we may have some bad weather (meaning hail and/or tornadoes), but may be not. It has been quite nice (fairly dry and cool) with enough rain to bring up the flowers.