Imagine a colleague gives you a giant spreadsheet of contacts and tells you that you’ll be emailing these people frequently for a new project. Should you spend hours painstakingly adding each contact into Outlook so you can easily email them?

Fortunately, the answer is “No.” Instead, you can export the contacts to a CSV (comma separated values) file and import them into Outlook. Microsoft has a great article about how to do this. Just click on the link below.

Export Contact Info From Excel and Import Into Outlook *

*Pay special attention to mapping custom fields in the instructions. This is when you can tell Outlook which column in your spreadsheet corresponds with which field in your Outlook Contact. If you don’t do this step, important information might not make it into Outlook.