How to Export Office 365 Contacts to CSV or Excel (Backup Required)

You’ll have used many email services to fetch emails on your device, similarly Microsoft allow you to use Outlook as an email service provider by which you can access emails/contacts/calenders/tasks/journals in two ways: “Outlook on desktop” or “Outlook on the web”. Here ‘Office 365’ is known as ‘Outlook on the web’ or ‘Outlook Web Access’ (Sometimes people call it ‘OWA’ in short)


Why to Export Office 365 Contacts to CSV or Excel ?

Exporting contacts from MS Outlook or Outlook on the desktop is very easy but when it comes to export contacts from Office 365 to CSV, people found it’s quite a tough job. However importing of contacts from Office 365 is little bit easier as compare to exporting the same contacts in Office 365.
Sometimes when you try to find the solution through Google or on different forums site or by reading articles, you’ve suggested to install Outlook on your desktop >> after Outlook on your desktop is installed, configure Office 365 on MS Outlook or Outlook on the desktop and then go to ‘File’ and export the contacts from there.
What comes as a result from this scenario is that exporting contacts directly through Office 365/Outlook Web Access without installing Outlook on the desktop is not possible. So what if you have not purchased the license of MS Outlook.
When users try to export Office 365 contacts to CSV file using Outlook Web Access, I’ve seen them in many forums site complaining about that they cannot find the UI (User Interface) menu option that shows the option to export Office 365 contacts to Excel or CSV directly and sometimes Office 365 needs API (Application Programming Interface) connections.
Here I’ll let you know the procedure to export contacts from Office 365 which is Outlook on the web. Go through with the described steps:

Steps to Export Office 365 Contacts to CSV

To export contacts directly from Outlook Web Access, firstly you need to get the contacts from Outlook Web Access and then you can move them into MS Excel. To do that, you need to find the below mentioned simple steps.

  1. Sign into Office 365 and click on ‘My Contacts’ folder containing contact details such as person’s name, email address, phone number, etc.
  2. Select the contacts that you want to export to CSV.
  3. Click on Edit >> click on Copy to copy the details.
  4. Open a blank plain text file in your Notepad or any another program. Click Edit >> click on Paste to paste the details.
Important: If you have multiple contact files in OWA, Office 365 may split those contacts into several pages, in that case after selecting the contacts of first page, move towards the next page and copy the contacts into the blank text file (notepad) do this until the end page of your contacts. After you’ve copied all the contacts in your notepad, click on File >> click on Save As to save the copied contacts from notepad by providing the destination path.

Steps to move the Contacts into MS Excel

  1. Open a new Spreadsheet in MS Excel.
  2. From the ribbon bar, click on ‘Data’ >> click on ‘From Text’.
  3. Select the text file containing the contact details >> after that you’ll see an import wizard.
  4. Select ‘Delimited’ and click on Next.
  5. In Delimiters, select the ‘Tab and Space’ and click on ‘Next’.
  6. Click on ‘Finish’.
  7. Select the existing spreadsheet and click on ‘OK’. The contacts should now appear in a proper way in Excel sheet split into multiple columns.
  8. Now select the email address and move to the first column for easy import. You can also label the columns (optional).
  9. Click on ‘File’ >> click ‘Save As’. 
  10. In the Save As box, select CSV (Comma Delimited or *.csv) and provide the destination path and name of contact file.
  11. You should see the message “The selected file type does not support workbooks that contain multiple sheets” click on OK.
Tired?? I know this is a bit time consuming task, so I have also described the process below in which consumes less time, but only when if you have MS Outlook installed & configured with dummy account in your Machine.

  1. First get a Software: SysTools Office 365 Backup After installing the tool, you can get login through the software interface.
  2. Then download the contacts specifically if you want otherwise you can download emails & contacts too of your Office 365 account.
  3. After keeping a copy of contacts you can access these contacts in MS Outlook directly
  4. And then you could export contacts into CSV format, otherwise no need, because the copy of your contacts is already there in your PST file which you can access through Outlook desktop email application

Conclusion

After following the above procedure in a step by step manner, you’ll be able to export Office 365 (Outlook Web Access or OWA) contacts to a CSV file type directly and then if you need, you can import the exported CSV or Excel contacts to other email clients too.

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