Facing Duplicate Contacts in Outlook: Read This

For Outlook users, it is a very common to face duplicates items in Outlook mailbox. An Outlook user can receive duplicate mails or can have the same duplicates copy of other mailbox items like contacts, calendar entries in his mailbox. The duplicates in Outlook are tolerable up to some limit but this might create a severe problem if user gets thousands of duplicates in his mailbox.

If the duplicate items count is less, you can choose to delete/remove the outlook duplicates manually but manual deletion of thousands of Outlook duplicates will be wastage of manpower as well as time.
In such case, the user has to search for some other Outlook duplicate remover alternative method rather than performing manual deletion.
So, it’s better for the user to adopt some preventative measure to avoid duplicates in Outlook.

Duplicate Contacts in Outlook:
Like other mail items, you can also get duplicate contacts in Outlook contact list. This may happen while: 

• Creating fresh new contact
• Creating contact from an email message
• Creating  contact from electronic business card
• Or importing a list of contacts/PST file/other e-mail application.

'Duplicate Detection feature' in Outlook helps you to avoid duplicate contacts. Each time you add a contact, it checks if the same name or Email-address already exists or not. If it finds so, it will prompt a dialog box to ask you for confirmation, you can choose the 'add new contact' or ' update option'.

While importing contacts from a file, it’s better to turn off the Duplicate Detection feature to speed up the copying process.

Once you are done with adding your contacts you can delete the duplicates manually.
To perform an easy deletion you need something that can distinguish the newly added duplicate contacts from the previous existing contacts.
You can do this by:

• Changing views:

First, Change to contacts then select a view (such as phone list view) that will let you easily sort and find duplicates.

• Changing the list :

You can customize the view to show the modified field.
For that: Go to View >Current View>Customize Current View.

• Adding the modified field :
• Click 'Fields' button then, 'Show Fields' dialog box will be prompted
• From the list on the left choose ‘Modified’ and click ‘Add’.
• Move the 'Modified field' up in the list by clicking ‘Move Up'.
• Click OK twice. 

• Sorting the list :

You can sort the list on basis of different sorting criteria such as: sort by Full Name or File As.

You can choose the sorting option by clicking header at top of any column and then, selecting the criteria for sorting to be applied.

• Then, you can delete the duplicate contacts from Outlook by selecting the duplicate contacts and then, pressing 'DELETE'.

The step by step duplicate contact removal process varies for different versions of Outlook. Though, the general steps are quite similar for all Outlook versions. You can read my upcoming article to know,”How to remove duplicate contacts in Outlook 2003”.