Deal with Outlook Duplicate Contacts After Knowing the Reasons

Read time: 5 minutes

If you rely on MS Outlook for professional or personal use, you’re likely aware of the significance of every element it encompasses – from tasks and calendars to emails, attachments, journals, notes, and contacts. Therefore, it’s crucial to steer clear of unnecessary items, particularly duplicate ones. Accumulating redundant items can give rise to a host of issues, including space consumption, sluggishness in MS Outlook, and other vexing scenarios. In this article, we delve into the primary causes of duplicate contacts and explore potential solutions.

Here’s another reason for the existence of duplicate contacts:

• Importing contacts from various devices that have same contacts
• Single user with multiple email accounts
• Synchronizing with multiple social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.
• Importing contacts from other online or email platforms

Hence, you may encounter duplicate contacts in Outlook, but the issue of duplicate emails can be even more troublesome. Dealing with duplicate emails becomes simpler when you understand the underlying causes for their occurrence in Outlook.

How to Remove Duplicate Contacts from Outlook?

We’re outlining a few straightforward methods to address the problem of duplicate contacts:

• Try removing duplicate contacts one by one
  Yes, the very first manual way to remove duplicates is to perform it by selecting contacts one by one. For this, you need to open Outlook, select the People sign dedicated to contacts, now select the Phone icon, mentioned in the current view ribbon on the top of the Home screen. Now select duplicate contacts one by one by holding the Ctrl key. Once you have selected all the duplicate contacts, delete them by pressing Ctrl + D. This is a hectic approach and nearly impossible if you have a lot of contacts.
• Try using Import/Export option
  With Import/Export utility, you can remove duplicate contacts, and it is easier, or you can say less hectic then removing emails one by one. Let’s get started:
  Phase 1: First you need to open contacts and create a new folder there and then select all your contacts from the contact list and move them to the newly created folder. Now your contact folder is empty; this is the time when you start the import/export process from the File menu. Start the process just like you do with emails and select Export to proceed and go for Comma separated values. Now, in the process, select the new folder you created and save the file.
  Phase 2: Now, you need to import the contacts back to Outlook again. For that, start the Import/Export process again from the File menu and select Import from another program or file this time. While proceeding further, browse the file newly created file again, and select Do not import duplicate items and opt for the primary contact folder for the destination, as we left it empty. Finish the process.
  Phase 3: Now copy the contacts from the duplicate folder and add it back in the primary folder. So, to start, open the newly created folder and select all the contacts and move them to the primary contact folder. While transferring select Update information of selected contact if Outlook prompts action for a duplicate item. After this select update if you do not want the duplicate of that specific item, if you want this action for all duplicate items, select update all. Once all contacts are migrated, finish the process and delete the folder you created recently.
• Try Kernel for Outlook Duplicates Remover
  Kernel for Outlook Duplicates Remover is a cut short way to remove the duplicate items from MS Outlook. These items could be emails, journals, contacts, notes, calendars, attachments, and notes, basically, every item Outlook has. Let’s see how you can remove duplicate contacts:
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  1. Install and run the software in the system.
  2. Click Add Task to add the information about the process.
  3. The next step, give a Task Name and Task Description. Click on Next to proceed.
  4. Now, the list of Outlook folders will be on display. Select contacts folder from there.

  

  5. In this step, select Delete Permanently from the list of actions and click on Next button to proceed.
  6. In Duplicate Comparison Criteria dialogue box, select your preferences on which you want the results. Click on Next to proceed.

  

  7. Once the process is done the whole report will be displayed to you by the software if you want to save it click on Save Report.
  8. Click the Finish button to end the process.

  Now, go and check your contacts folder, all duplicate contacts must be gone for sure.

Conclusion:

We have detailed both manual and automated approaches for distinguishing duplicate contacts from the original ones. After learning about duplicate contacts and their removal methods, you might be wondering which option to choose. From my own experience as a user, I found that employing an automated method for removing duplicates proved to be faster and more user-friendly. The automated approach not only offers speed and ease of use but also ensures accuracy and the preservation of all original contacts simultaneously. What’s even better is that this tool not only assists in removing duplicate contacts but also helps in eliminating duplicate items in MS Outlook.