Outlook: How To Delete Duplicated Contacts

Contributed by Rob Rogers

Tagged: Microsoft Outlook

Sometimes syncing Outlook with another application or device can result in the addition of a duplicated list of contacts. Removing this list can be quite cumbersome if you take the time to delete each one, especially if you have collected a large number of addresses and such. Here’s a much quicker method:

1. Go to Contacts.

2. Click View, mouseover Current View and select Phone List. This will create a list of all of your contacts in a column based view.

3. Right-click a column header and select Field Chooser from the resulting menu.

4. In the Field Chooser box, use the dropdown and select All Contact fields.

5. Select Created.

6. Drag Created to the Colun Headers to add it to the list. Close the Field Chooser box.

7. Now click on the newly added column header (Created). This will sort all of your items by the date that they were added to your Contacts.

8. Scroll down to the first contact in the list that is to be deleted and select it.

9. Scroll down to the last contact that is to be deleted. Hold down the Shift key and select this contact. This will highlight all of the contacts that you are going to remove.

10. Press the Delete key. The duplicate contacts will be removed.

11. Click View, mouseover Current View and select the view you normally use for your contacts (such as Business Cards).

12. Your Contacts should not display any duplicates.

80 Comments -

Pat said on October 6, 2008

Great method of doing this!!!!!!!!!!!
Anonymous said on October 17, 2008

Terrific!
2,000 contact data base with duplicate entries.
This beats restoring from a backup only a few days old.
Joan said on October 17, 2008

What is the difference between Busines Contact Manager and our Contacts records?
Are they 2 different animals? I want to delete the Bus Contact Mgr, but can’t seem to manage it.
Andrew M said on October 20, 2008

This was brill & really helped me.
Chris said on October 21, 2008

All my contacts show the same creation date…. and time… including the duplicates.

Any other suggestions?
Craig said on October 22, 2008

Yes, I had/have a similar problem… IF they are identicle its easy — just delete all but one for a goven contact. But if you are lazy like me :) and revised a few contacts but don’t know which ones are not identicle, two tips:

Add the “modified time” to the list to see which one was modfied latest.
Add the “size” field to the list and make sure to format it in exact bytes — it two contacts are the EXACT size to the byte (e.g. 2,089 bytes) you can be pretty confident they are identicle.

Secondly, using these fields as well as the created field, play with “group by” on the “file as” field or some field that is ALWAYS consistent for 2+ duplicates based on the way you work. Then you can just scan the “groups” with 2+ entries and triage them with the original author’s method plus the two other fields I suggested to make sure to get the latest.

Finally, of you can’t figure it out by glancing at these fields, drag the contact(s) to a temporary contact folder, and drag them back in one at a time — Outlook will then notice the duplicate and merge them. Unfortunately there is no easy way to do this en masse as far as I know.

Craig
http://www.claritycon.com
larry groves said on November 4, 2008

Done – it took longer finding the fix than executing it – what a help
Jim said on November 7, 2008

I deleted a contact (distro group) by mistake and I want to get it back. Where does it go, and can I get it back?
Jake B. said on November 9, 2008

Great tip. Worked great in Outlook 2007 after I synced my iPAQ and suddenly ended up with all duplicate contacts for some reason. Thanks.
Rich said on December 5, 2008

My contacts on my iPod Touche are duplicated when syncing with Outlook. They are not in duplicate in Outlook
jbjbcooper said on December 17, 2008

I followed the instructions to a ‘T’. I hit delete and lost all my contacts. Can’t seem to restore them. Delete erased all my contacts, not just the duplicates
Dmitry said on December 21, 2008

It doesn’t work if all contacts of the same date!
Howard said on December 22, 2008

works great!
Bill said on December 23, 2008

super format
Anon said on December 23, 2008

This in NO WAY coherently groups the duplicate records; it is still a manual process or you will simply delete all your contacts.
It’s easier just to export to excel; clean it up and re-import it.
This is nonsense.
L3 said on January 23, 2009

Most of my contacts have the same ‘Created’ date because they are given the date of import.

This does not indicate which contacts are duplicates.
Luois said on January 24, 2009

Excellent !!! Worked like a charm ! Thank for putting and end to a headache!
Sarah said on February 4, 2009

How do you do this for Outlook 2007/Vista?
lorraine said on February 13, 2009

I deleted a contact with information that i would like to retrieve, thought everyting went into my deleted foler but nothing there, does anyone know how to retrieve a deleted contact?
John M. said on February 15, 2009

Now THAT is a really good tip. Thankis!
Joe Marfice said on February 21, 2009

I have Outlook 2003 as well. It should be available as a button on your toolbar. If the “Current View” button isn’t available on your toolbar, use
View / Toolbars… / Customize…
to bring up the customize dialog, and then select the
Commands tab
at the top. From there, select
View
and scroll until you find “Current View”. Click-and-drag this button to the toolbar, close the dialog box, and you’re done!
Jay Glass said on March 16, 2009

Great tip! Much better than software reported to do this function. Thank you for publishing this method. Best to you
John Scott said on March 27, 2009

I don’t know how I got here???

The question was how do I remove all blank entries in my addressbook? You see I have 277 contracts and more than that are all blank when I export?
Jeff said on April 13, 2009

Great tip! I’ve been through this problem many times–still dealing with it, in fact. This will help immensely.
Wondering if you can help with a similar issue. On syncing with my iPhone, it duplicated all Work Phones and Mobile Phones in EVERY contact…so no duplicate contacts, but all with duplicated phone numbers. So, I want to duplicate the 2nd entries in each contact…like deleting a column out of a spreadsheet. Thx.
Rinesh said on April 23, 2009

This was really helpful. Great thanks
Mike said on May 1, 2009

WARNING: These tips did not work for me…I DELETED ALL MY CONTACT..NO WAY TO RETRIEVE. THEN I SYNCED MY IPHONE THINKING I COULD RE LOAD THE CONTACT NEGATIVE….DELETED ALL CONTACTS ON MY IPHONE!!!!! LUCKILY I HAVE MY OTHER COMPUTER WITH NUMBER TO BACK UP…LET’S SEE….

SO WHAT DID I DO WRONG?
Scott said on May 10, 2009

Ya me too. Do not have the last 2wks of new contacts. Not as bad as some I suppose.
Kelly said on May 20, 2009

I did EVERYTHING asked but once I deleted what I thought were the duplicates, I selected Business Cards view and NO CONTACTS!

Now I have to go to my Deleted Folder and drag them all back WHY?
Elaine Northcutt said on June 1, 2009

This solution worked perfectly!
Sam said on June 7, 2009

I don’t have any experience with iPhones but with any gadget, if you delete entries from your computer, and then synchronise it with your gadget, it’s only logical that the process removes those entries from your gadget as well!
Don Fullilove said on June 9, 2009

Is this a joke? I was able to delete all of my contacts by following the above instructions…..all I wanted to do was delete the duplicates. Now, can anyone help me recover my contact files?
Mikey said on June 29, 2009

I agree 100%! This only is good for that singular situation where you have double-synched a handheld to an existing Outlook database and essentially duplicated the entire database. If not, then you still have to hunt and peck to find your duplicates. There are trial SW’s out there that will do an actual search for duplicates.
Eddy said on July 3, 2009

Auto select findes some old addresses that I cannot find them anywhere and they are not in my contact list. are they in anothe Global or MS Office address book? How can I find an ddelet them.
mike said on July 9, 2009

Wow this is great, saved a ton of time, worth the effort of going to web site and looking for help, sometimes it is a waste of effort, not this time for me,

I have 2007
Anonymous said on July 17, 2009

can you locate a contact by number? i.e. 562 (of 1059)
Name said on July 24, 2009

Thank you for this information. I was about ready to tear my hair out!!
Ron Freedman said on August 10, 2009

I followed the directions above exactly, the process deleted practically all of my records duplicates and non-duplicates. Is there any way to find the records it delected so I could reinstall them. Living with duplicates is better than having nothing at all.
Eddy said on August 11, 2009

I am surprise as in my case when I deleted the file Outlook.nk2 and restarted Outlook, it regenerated a new file with all previous contacts. It was good for a time, but more surprisingly the old email addresses are coming back, It appears to me that they are some where in crazy MS. I suggest that you search your computer for *.nk2 you may find the deleted file.
Ron said on August 11, 2009

I tried to find *.nk2 file but was unable to find one. Any other suggestions?

Ron
Eddy said on August 13, 2009

Sorry Ron, unless you had it syncronised with another application, like Mobile Phone etc, otherwise no other suggestion, maybe you want to talk with MS.
Anonymous said on September 11, 2009

This worked spectacularly and saved me hours of work
Thanks!
swise said on September 29, 2009

if you hit shift at the last duplicate you wish to remove it highlights all contacts in between and deletes duplicates and non-duplicates. Now I understand that you can scroll through using the ctrl key and highlight all duplicates manually but I wanted to find a time saving way to do this…
Neal said on October 5, 2009

Sound great, but I do not have a “created” field in my Outlook 2007.

Any suggestions?
Name said on October 5, 2009

this did not help at all!!!
Anonymous said on October 8, 2009

I removed all my contact informtion in order to remove all duplicates and managed to deleted my entire database.Very Smart! Is there anyway I could retrieve it????Please advice
Osama said on October 12, 2009

Thanks a lot. u helped me a lot. “))
Anonymous said on October 18, 2009

This was incredibly helpful.
LeslieTr said on November 3, 2009

Worked great; my Palm did an early am sync & resulted in 2x contacts. Wasn’t looking forward to editing them one at a time. Start to finish this was a time saver !
Anonymous said on November 9, 2009

This saved me so much time, so simple yet so useful!
Anonymous said on December 5, 2009

Very ood solution. Thanks
Anonymous said on December 9, 2009

outstanding, effective and simple
aswolfe said on December 30, 2009

took all of five minutes to delete my duplicates (there were 150 duplicated contacts).
Anonymous said on December 31, 2009

Awesome—! i’ve always wondered where this was!
Anonymous said on January 9, 2010

Not helpful I do not display an All Contacts option on the selection of Field Chooser.
Anonymous said on January 18, 2010

But it doesn’t merge them?
Contact: Tom White, Westside State Bank, Highway 30, Westside, IA
Contact: Tom White, Bus Phone: 712-663-4398, email: tjw@wssbank.com

I will gladly delete one BUT I want them merged first. And which one has journal entries? I want to keep that one
Anonymous said on January 21, 2010

This only solves duplicated contacts resulting from a mass import. It does not even find duplicated contacts through the folders. To do it, before following your suggestions we’ll probably have to export each folder to a CSV file, merge the files and import the resulting file to a folder. Then we can work it out in a single folder. Or you can copy al contacts from all folders to one only. However, this is not exactly what we could call a satisfying solutions. We get all our contacts mixed up. II think there is no real way to check suplicates through the folders, or is there a better way to do it?
Anonymous said on February 10, 2010

Worked like a charm, thank you so much from saving me from having to manually delete almost 700 contacts. I owe you hours of my life!
JS said on February 22, 2010

I think the bigger question is, (and your solution was wonderful), how do we prevent this from happening, or what is the mechanism by which I get not only dupilcate contacts, but multiple listings of calendar events (like 20 listings of the same calendar event at the same time)?
Anonymous said on March 1, 2010

This is the GREATEST advice about Outlook I ever received. This is nowhere in outlook help. It works perfectly. My duplicates arose between outlook 03/ 07/ and palm synching between 5 different computers. Wonderful. For those who deleted “everything”, they were not careful in following instructions and making certain only the entries to be deleted were highlighted BEFORE hitting the delete button.
Jaime said on March 3, 2010

Thank you very much. That is the best solution I have found.
Anonymous said on April 7, 2010

thankyou i tried a new sync program that made a mess of things took me 5 minutes to fix
Anonymous said on April 18, 2010

I don’t see how this would work unless I knew the dates that the duplicates were made. After multiple syncings between (two) computers, iPhone, and MobileMe, I have got a mess.
Anonymous said on May 1, 2010

I have duplicate entries in some cases triple entries, but they all show the SAME DATE, so i can’t use “shift” because it highlights everything since the entries aren’t separated by dates. I really don’t want to do this manually. Please help
Prapons said on June 11, 2010

Wow, it works. Thanks a lot. It save a lot of time instead of going to delete the contacts one by one.
Lashknife said on June 22, 2010

Awesome, perfect solution for such an annoying random occuring problem

regards
Lashknife
Quartetmania said on July 13, 2010

The only thing I get when I select VIEW is Toolbar. Nothing else.
Ndh said on July 16, 2010

NICE, That worked perfectly!!! Thanks Microsoft… I needed duplicates of everything…
annon said on July 28, 2010

Excellent!
Aser said on October 24, 2010

Worked for me – than you
Len said on November 26, 2010

Genius!! saved me loads of time 1100 contacts replicated twice, now back to normal
Thank you
anothertechie said on December 26, 2010

genius
Srinath said on February 22, 2011

Thank you very much for the tip. Really helped me a lot.
Hnashok said on June 7, 2011

Thanks for saving hundreds of hours of painstaking work for so many grateful people.

Ashok
Hnashok said on June 7, 2011

Thanks for saving hundreds of hours of painstaking work for so many grateful people.

Ashok
Hnashok said on June 7, 2011

Thanks for saving hundreds of hours of painstaking work for so many grateful people.

Ashok
Theresa said on June 8, 2011

Hi There, is it OK to use this even if the duplicates have been in place for quite some time? And we are using Exchange Server? Thanks so much!
Scrubly said on August 2, 2011

Will have to try this out to help
Rich said on September 13, 2011

Big help! Thanks.
Alok Jha said on December 31, 2011

Voila….. Done in few sec and deleted almost 1500 contacts..

Gr8 Job

Alok
Joyce Sinclair said on January 3, 2012

Thanks heaps. This has saved me so much time.

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Outlook: How To Delete Duplicated Contacts

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