Import an Excel file into Outlook contacts

Marketing handed me an xlsx with 900 leads to load into a shared Outlook contacts folder. The import wizard greys out or errors on the Excel file.

Did Outlook stop supporting Excel imports? What is the working procedure?

It did stop: modern Outlook's wizard dropped direct xlsx import, CSV is the only spreadsheet route now. The good news is Excel converts in one save and the rest of the wizard works as always.

1

In Excel tidy the sheet first: one header row, no merged cells, no blank columns splitting the data. Then File, Save As, format CSV (Comma delimited).

2

In Outlook: File, Open and Export, Import/Export, Import from another program or file, Comma Separated Values.

3

Browse to the CSV, choose the duplicates option you want and select the shared contacts folder as the destination.

4

Click Map Custom Fields before finishing. Drag the spreadsheet's column names onto Outlook's fields, marketing sheets rarely use Outlook's naming so two minutes here decides whether 900 records land correctly.

Regional catch worth knowing: on systems with a European locale, Excel's CSV save uses semicolons instead of commas and the Outlook wizard then reads every row as one giant field. The fix is saving through Excel's CSV UTF-8 option or temporarily setting the list separator to a comma under Region settings. If your mapped preview in the wizard shows all the data crammed into the first column, this is exactly what happened.

Sheet cleaned, saved as CSV UTF-8, mapped six columns and all 900 landed in the shared folder. The semicolon warning explained the first failed attempt exactly.