Outlook - Autocomplete email addresses

Have you ever wondered where Outlook keeps the hidden "address book" that auto-completes the email address as you type it in the To: box?

How do you get all those email addresses turned into contacts so you can move them around between computers etc?

The Answer: Outlook keeps them in an NK2 file. There is an NK2 file associated with each Outlook Profile on your computer and it is stored in the directory Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook

More good news, there is a free utility called NK2View available from NirSoft It works magic on the NK2 file allowing you to fix an erroneous entry, export, delete etc. Just download and run it. It will open your current NK2 file and you can see all the auto-complete entries. You can export them as a text file and import them into Outlook as contacts. You can also do the reverse and take addresses in your address book and add them to your NK2 Auto Complete list. JUST WONDERFUL!

Remember before messing with files that are important to you...BACK THEM UP! You will be so happy if somehow it gets corrupted and you have a nice backup file :)

Extra Outlook - See Two different Exchange Servers at the same time

The problem has always been that Outlook supports only one Exchange server per profile. This means that if you are a consultant or work in a company with multiple Exchange servers that operate independently you were out of luck. You had to login to one...check your mail...close and open outlook again...select a second profile and login.

After a while searching on Google I found a solution to this problem courtesy of Paul Ockenden.

Tim Mullen and Jason Geffner worked together and came up with a solution! The problem is that the programmers of Microsoft Outlook basically do a FindWindow to see if outlook is already open and then if it is they kill the new process and open a window in the already open version. Once Jason got past that, he found that the next thing those efficient programmers did was check to see if a MAPI instance was already out there and if so use it, thereby eliminating the ability to sign into a second profile.

Tim wrote a little utility that jumps around all that and allows you to open a true second instance of Outlook. So...

1. Create your separate Outlook Profiles for each Exchange account and set it to prompt for profile name

2. Go to Tim's site below and download ExtraOutlook.zip

3. Copy ExtraOutlook.exe to your MS Office installation directory (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12)

4. Create a Shortcut with a target like "ExtraOutlook c:\program files\microsoft office\office12\outlook.exe"

5. Double Click and Enjoy having two Exchange accounts open at once.

Kudos for this information goes to

PCAuthority and Paul Ockenden

REblog and Jason Geffner

Hammer of God and Tim Mullen with his super utility ExtraOutlook