Functionality
Address2Contact is a VBA module to be included into an Outlook 2000 VBA project. It provides a macro to create contacts from one or more address book entries and a macro to refresh the contact items.

Background
Why use Contacts rather than the address book?
Contact items have a couple of advantages over address book entries:

• Can hold more information
• Can hold attachments
• Can be categorized
• Can be flagged
• Can be synchronized to a PDA.

However, contacts also have some disadvantages. The main disadvantage is that choosing a recipient from the contact list (called Outlook address book )  is less performing than using the normal Exchange address book.

Prerequisites
Address2Contact can only live in an Outlook 2000 VBA project. As you may know,  VBA in Outlook is not document-based but application-based, i.e. there is only one Outlook VBA project on your machine. 

Installation
Dending on where you picked Address2Contact from you either got a .bas module or a code excerpt to cut and paste. In the latter case create your own .bas module and paste the excerpt into it. Next, open the VBA editor in Outlook and import the .bas module into this project. Afterwards you should find 2 more macros Create_Contacts_From_Addresses and Refresh_Contacts_From_Addresses in your macro list. You also need to add a reference to the Microsoft CDO 1.21 Library to the project.
For more information about installation of VBA modules see here

Usage

• Create_Contacts_From_Addresses 
  This macro creates new contact items from address book entries. When you invoke this macro, an address book dialog pops up. From this dialog you can select one or more addresses. After pressing the Create Contact button the corresponding contact items are created.
  
• Refresh_Contacts_From_Addresses 
  This macro refreshes existing contacts from the corresponding address book entries. You can either refresh all items in the contact folder or particular items. To do the latter, select the desired items in the folder and then invoke the macro. The whole folder is refreshed when no items is selected in the contacts folder. It's not worth to mention that only contact properties which correspond to address book properties are affected by the refresh. 
  

How it works
An critical point in the process is how the association between the contact item and the corresponding address book entry is achieved. It is achieved assigning "Lastname, Firstname" to the property Nickname. 

Known issues
What you get here is not a product but a private tool which I offer for public use. It can be used on a as-is basis without any warranty. However, when you find bugs or you have ideas for enhancements feel free to contact me.
In order to get the Refresh_Contacts_From_Addresses macro to work, the address book options needs to set to ...

Revisions

• 15-Jan-00: Initially submitted
• 23-Aug-02: Add a hint to the installation description