You can do IT in later life

You can do IT is a regular feature of laterlife.com aimed at trying to help laterlife visitors make the most of Information Technology on or off the web. 

Jackie Sherman who runs the You can do IT Question & Answer section is an IT trainer and author. Jackie has spent her career in education and specialises in teaching IT to adults. Her courses for adults include such topics as MS Office, the Internet, e-mail and basic web page authoring.  

Jackie has also written several books - you can find more details about these by clicking here. Jackie has also been running a course specifically for over 50s.

Via laterlife.com Jackie aims to particularly help those new to IT and the web to build up knowledge and confidence, so no question is too basic. At the same time she will cover Q&As for the more experienced user. 

So if you would like to ask a question of Jackie, or if you have discovered something which may be of interest to others in making the most of the web, then she would love to hear about that too. Why not email her jackie@laterlife.com

June 2006

 
Importing email addresses

Q:       I have a word processed document that just contains the email addresses of people I need to write to. Is there any way to add them to my Outlook Express address book that won't involve typing in each one manually?

A:        This is quite a complex task, but you can do it if you follow these steps:

1. Turn the text into a table
2. Copy the table into a spreadsheet package such as Excel and save it as a CSV (Comma Separated Values) text file.
3. Import the CSV file into Outlook Express.
 

1. Turning text into a table

To do this, every text entry in the document must be separated from the next by the same "delimiter" e.g. a tab, comma or space. Select all the text in the document and then open the Table menu and select Convert – Text to Table. (This is always a useful skill to learn as text is often better displayed in table format, and you can sort it much more easily!)

A window (dialogue box) will open and you must set the number of columns e.g. in this case to 1 and then choose the delimiter. If it is a space, select Other and then click in the box and press the space bar before clicking OK.


You will now find all your text is set out in a table, one entry per cell.

 

2. Convert a table to a CSV file

Select the complete table of entries, click Copy and then open Excel. Click the first empty cell (A1) and press Paste. Your table will now appear as an Excel spreadsheet.

To convert the file, simply open the Save As: box and select CSV as the type of file in the drop-down box. You can now close the file, making sure you know where on your computer it is saved.



 

3. Import addresses into Outlook Express

Open the email package and go to File – Import. Select Other Address Book and in the window that opens, select Text file (Comma Separated Values). Now click Import and browse for the file you saved before clicking Next.

 

As you want to produce a list of e-mail addresses, you must set this up as the correct category (field). Click the Change Mapping button and select Email Address from the drop-down list you will be offered before clicking OK.

You will now see the first email address from your word processed table, and a label next to it saying Email Address in the Address Book Field. You must click to put a tick in the box next to the name to set the field correctly before you can finish.

If you look in your Address Book, you will now see all your new email addresses listed. For each entry, the Name field will contain a repeat of the email address, but you can always change this manually for any entry by double-clicking the name and adding details in the properties box.

 

View previous editions of YoucandoIT for more useful Questions and Answers
 

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