Updated November 21, 2011
Get Your Gmail Contacts Into Outlook 2010: Here’s How
If you want to make the Gmail Outlook 2010 connection, and be able to work with your Gmail account in Outlook 2010 as well as using your web browser, you need to do two things. The first is, of course, to set up the Gmail Outlook connection for your email.
That’ll let you read and write Gmail messages in Outlook, and free you from having to constantly check your email in two different places. There’s a link at the bottom of this page that takes you to the instructions for setting up a Gmail IMAP connection to Outlook which synchronizes messages between the two and works great.
The second step is to make sure that Outlook has a copy of all your Gmail Contacts, so you can easily get in touch with all the people you typically contact through Gmail. Getting your Gmail Contacts into Outlook is what we’re going to talk about here.
Note: If you are trying to get your Gmail Contacts into Outlook 2007 instead of Outlook 2010, then you should CLICK HERE.
Before we go any further, understand that what we will be doing is making a copy of your Gmail contacts and transferring that copy into Outlook 2010. There won’t be any continuing back-and-forth synchronization between your Gmail Contacts and you Outlook Contacts like you get with the Gmail Outlook connection linked at the bottom of this page.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a similar solution for contacts. That means if you add new contacts using the Gmail web interface instead of Outlook 2010, you’ll need to run this process again to get the new Gmail Contacts into Outlook. And if you add contacts on the Outlook side, they won’t show up on the Gmail side.
Copy Your Gmail Contacts to Outlook Contacts
It’s easy to get a copy of your Gmail contacts into Outlook. There are a lot of steps but nothing too complicated. Just follow these steps:
- Log into your Gmail account and click the Contacts tab. This displays your Gmail Contacts list.
- at the bottom center of the box containing your Contacts, click the More Actions button. This opens the menu shown below.
- Click Export. This opens the “Export Contacts” dialog box.
- Select “All contacts” and “Outlook CSV format,” then click Export. Depending on your browser, Gmail will either display a “Save As” dialog box, or automatically save the Gmail Contacts file, with a file name of “google.csv” or “contacts.csv” to your browser’s default download directory. If you get to choose the file name and location, be sure not to change the extension (.csv) and to record the filename you use and where you save it.
- In Outlook 2010, click the File tab in the Ribbon, then the Open button.
- Click Import. The “Import and Export” Wizard appears.
- Select “Import from another program or file,” then click Next
- Select “Comma Separated Values (DOS)” and click Next. This opens an “Import a File” screen.
- Click Browse, and navigate to the location you recorded earlier. You should see the filename you recorded, probably without the “.csv” part.
- Select the file name and click OK. This displays the “Import a File” screen.
- Select the “Do not import duplicate items” option, and click Next. This opens a screen that allows you to specify where you want to put the imported contacts.
- Navigate through the folder until you see the Contacts folder. Select the Contacts folder to tell Outlook to import all the contacts into this folder, and click Next.
- In the screen that appears, Outlook tells you exactly what it will be doing, which is importing contacts from the file into your Contacts folder. Click Finish and allow Outlook to do its work.
It may take a few minutes for Outlook to process your contacts. While it is working, you will see a box on your screen that shows you how the work is progressing.
Once that box disappears, the work is done and your Gmail Contacts have been copied to Outlook.
From here you can:
Return to the top of this Gmail Contacts to Outlook 2010 page.
Go to the Outlook 2010 Contacts home page.
Go to the main Gmail Outlook configuration page.
Go to the Living With Outlook 2010 home page.
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