Outlook 2000 -- Outlook 2003 incompatibility

[jazzman111]

I mainly use Mozilla's Firebird for my email client on my home PC but recently set up the Outlook 2002 client, as well. My intention was to export my Contact files from the Outlook 2003 program on my company laptop. When I tried importing the .pst file into my Outlook 2002 program, I received an error message saying it was incompatible with it. Can I download Outlook 2003 as freeware somewhere? Is there an upgrade I can add to my OL 2002 program?

 

[cmeagan656]

I'm confused. You're subject indicates that you're going from Outlook 2000 t Outlook 2003 but your description of the issue mentions Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2002.

In any case, try exporting the contacts to a .csv file on the source machine and importing the .csv file into Outlook on the target machine. You do this from inside of Outlook (OL2K to OL2K3) using File ->Import and Export...

Cheers.

 

[smah]

The default .pst file format changed for Outlook 2003. There are several ways to go forward to the new unicode format, but I didn't see anything right off to convert back to the ansi format (but I didn't look too hard). Dig in with something like [google]export pst unicode outlook 2003 ansi[/google].

Alternatively, if you're only after your existing contatcts, you can export them to a CSV file and import them into either the previous version of Outlook or directly into Thunderbird.

 

[jazzman111]

My apologies for the typo. I'm trying to export my contact list from OL2003 on my company laptop to OL2002 on my home PC. I'll give the idea of exporting it in the form of CSV files. Thanks for your help.

 

[58sniper]

Smah's answer is right where you want to look. There are two different formats of .pst files that 2003 can use (ANSI and Unicode). But only one format in 2000 (ANSI). CSV isn't the answer if you have images or attachments in your Contacts.

Create a new ANSI .pst file in Outlook 2003. Copy your Contacts to it and move it to the (really) old version.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[jazzman111]

Pat,

Thanks for the additional information. There were no images in my Contact file and the .csv conversion and import worked perfectly.

Jim