Outlook sucks more than I even imagined

WARNING: This is a rant. I’ll get back to normal blogging soon. 🙂

I just spent the last 2 hours trying to change my over 1000 contacts from “Lastname, Firstname” to “Firstname Lastname” in Outlook.

This should not be hard. I cannot believe that Microsoft charges actual money for products so flawed and un-user-friendly.

Microsoft’s official answer to someone who had the same question back in 2003 was

Outlook cannot apply your settings fo the File As field to imported Contacts. You have to do that manually or write code to do it after the import.

You’re telling your users that they have to write code to perform such a simple function? And take a look at the code example they pointed this poor soul at!

I will never buy a Microsoft product again.

But for any others of you chained to Outlook, here is a simpler solution:

• Go to Tools->Macro->Macros…
• Type in a name. E.g. “Fix_Stupid_Outlook_Contacts”
• Click “Create”
• Copy ‘n Paste this Code:

Dim items As items, item As ContactItem, folder
Dim contactItems As Outlook.items
Dim itemContact As Outlook.ContactItem
Set folder = Session.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderContacts)
Set items = folder.items
Count = items.Count
If Count = 0 Then
    MsgBox "No contacts found."
    Exit Sub
End If
'Filter on the message class to obtain only contact items in the folder
Set contactItems = items.Restrict("[MessageClass]='IPM.Contact'")
For Each itemContact In contactItems
   itemContact.FileAs = itemContact.FirstName + " " + itemContact.LastName
   itemContact.Save
Next
MsgBox "Your contacts have been re-filed."

• File->Save
• File->Close and return to Outlook
• Go to Tools->Macro->Macros…
• Select your macro and press “Run”