JamesX

The saga concludes!! In my switch over to the Mac, I needed a way to transfer all my PIM data from Microsoft Outlook on the PC to the OS X equivalent product Microsoft Entourage. Who would have thought that exporting data from one Microsoft product to another would be so difficult. There are three parts of information that I needed to extract: Contacts, Email and Calendar. It’s taken me three days and help from a lot of resources to actually accomplish this goal so I’m documenting it here for anyone else who may need it in the future. I used Outlook 2003 and Entourage 2004. I know this works, because this is how I did it!

Just in case something goes wrong, back up your Outlook data first! The first thing you need to do is extract all the data that you want to keep from Outlook. To grab the Contacts, go to File > Export and select “Tab Delimited (Windows)”. Then select the Contacts folder and specify where you want the file to be saved. I made a new folder called “Entourage” on the desktop to put them in. Once the file has been created, contacts are backed up.

The next on the list is the email. To export the Inbox intact (maintaining attachments and email headers) you will not be able to export them as a tab delimited file. You will need to download and install the Mozilla browser. Make sure you install the full package (including the Mail option in the setup). Once Mozilla has installed, fire it up and go to the Mail section (there’s a mail button down the bottom left of the Mozilla window). Using the menu at the top, select Tools > Import and then select the Mail radio button. Select Microsoft Outlook from the next dialog box and your email will be imported. Depending on the size of your mailbox and attachments it may take a while so go grab a coffee at this point. You can now close Mozilla and grab the files it has created from your Outlook import. The files are stored in C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\. There will be a few more sub folders to navigate through but it is random per machine. You need to find the Outlook.sbd folder and copy that to your “Entourage” folder on the desktop for safe keeping.

Open up the folder you just copied. You will notice a number of files that have been created from your Inbox. We are only interested in the files without an extension, you can delete all the .msf files. You now have to add a .mbox extension to all the files that are left (that is, the ones that had no extension to begin with). Windows will confirm the change and rename the file. That’s your email backed up.

The last on the list but, believe me, by no means least is your Calendar. As with the Contacts, you have to create a tab delimited file of all your appointments. Follow the steps as per the contacts and save the file in the same folder.

Now you need to copy your “Entourage” folder from your PC to your Mac. You can either do this across a network or by burning it to CD. Once you have copied them onto the Mac, open up the appointments text file in Microsoft Excel (or a similar program). You will have to juggle the columns around so that you have the following information. Type the column headings in the same order and the exact name you see here. Title, Date (Start), End Date, Start Time, End Time, Category 1, Category 2, Private. Delete all the other columns as you will not be able to import them into Entourage. Next you will need to install a copy of Palm Desktop. You can grab a free copy from the Palm website if you need one. Once installed, launch Palm Desktop and then select File > Import from the menu. Select the appointments text file you have just modified and click on Import. On the next dialog, you will need to make sure you select Date Book as the import type. It shouldn’t take too long to import and once it has finished, you can select File > Export from the menu. Set the Module to Date Book and the format to vCal then Export the file to your Mac desktop. Close Palm Desktop and open up iCal.

Once in iCal, select File > Import. Choose the “Import a vCal file” and click Import. Select the vCal file you exported from Palm Desktop and wait for iCal to add your appointments to the calendar. Once this has completed, you need to download a program called “Sync Entourage-iCal” (Google it). Run Sync and let it copy all your iCal entries into Entourage.

When it has finished, open up Entourage and click on File > Import. Select “Import information from a text file” then select “Import contacts from a tab- or comma-delimited text file”. Point Entourage to the contacts file you exported earlier and click Import. You should now have all your contacts and appointments successfully imported into Entourage. Finally, to import your mailbox items, open the folder with all the .mbox files in it and drag each .mbox file onto the Entourage icon on the Dock. It will put the folders in the Entourage folder list exactly how they were in Outlook.

There will be odd bits and pieces that will need tidying in the contacts and appointments but generally everything will be intact. It’s a long and annoying process but it works and it seems to be the easiest FREE solution compared to other options out there. Have fun!

Thanks to: Richard Heard, Alex Graul, Riches Communications, Google