Back in July 2012, Microsoft launched Outlook.com webmail service with an intention to replace its Hotmail with a modern email service. The fresh UI, best in class anti-spam engine, and smart options to organize the inbox easily make Outlook.com the best Microsoft webmail service yet.
The team behind Outlook.com has been adding new features to the service and offering ways to migrate from other popular email services. In fact, Outlook.com now lets you enable two-step verification to enhance account security.
While users who have migrated from Hotmail, Live, and MSN will find the design and features satisfactory, many users who temporality moved from Gmail to Outlook aren’t exactly happy with the set of features it has to offer and are returning to Google’s webmail service.
If you have used Outlook.com for any significant amount of time, you probably have added a few new people to your contacts, and now want to add those new contacts to Gmail account as well. While it’s possible to manually add contacts, the process might take hours when you have hundreds of contacts to add.
Also, users who have both Microsoft as well as Google account may sometime want to import all contacts from Outlook.com to Gmail.
If for whatever reason, you want to import contacts from your Microsoft account to Gmail, you can do so by exporting all contacts from your Microsoft account first and then importing the exported contacts. Complete the below mentioned instructions to easily import Outlook.com contacts in Gmail.
Step 1: Sign-in to your Hotmail, Live, MSN, or Outlook account using a web browser.
Step 2: At the top-left side of the inbox, click the Down arrow button next to the Outlook.com to see Mail, People, Calendar, and SkyDrive tiles.
Step 3: Click on People tile to view all contacts saved on your account.
Step 4: Click the Manage option located at the top of the page and then click Export option to download a file named WLMContacts.csv containing all your contacts. If you don’t want to add those contacts that are already in your Gmail account, you can remove easily delete duplicate contacts once you finish importing all contacts to Gmail (more info on this towards the end of this post).
Step 5: Head over to Gmail’s homepage and sign-in to your account by entering your username and password.
Step 6: Click on on the Gmail button located at the upper-left of the page to see Gmail, Contacts, and Tasks options.
Step 7: Click Contacts option to view recently imported contacts, if any. Next, click More button (see picture), and then click Import option to open Import Contacts box.
Step 8: Here, click the Browse button to browse to the WLMContacts.csv file that you have previously obtained by clicking Export button in your Outlook.com account. Browse to the file and then click Import button to begin importing all contacts from the file.
Once importing contacts is finished, you will see all imported contacts. If you would like to delete some imported contacts, select the check box next to the contacts, click More button and then click Delete contacts.
If you want organize contacts by deleting duplicate contacts, click More button and then click Find and merge duplicates option to view all duplicate contacts and delete them. You can even restore deleted contacts by clicking More button and then clicking Restore contacts option.
Good luck!
