You can save your myUSI Address Book entries by exporting them to a file format that is compatible with other email programs. The myUSI Address Book offers four email applications that it can export directly to, including Netscape Messenger, Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, and Novell GroupWise. If you use one of these applications for email, by following the steps below you should be able to export your address information from myUSI and into the application with little effort.

However, many people don’t use these specific desktop email applications or they use one of a miriad of Web based email accounts. Luckily, most of these programs will accept address book and contact data in a comma separated values, or CSV, file format. It turns out that the Microsot Outlook format that the myUSI Address Book exports is a CSV file. So, exporting your contact data using the Microsoft Outlook option is probably the most portable version overalll.

Exporting (Saving) Your Address Book Entries

If you have not already done so, go to the email Import/Export screen:

Login to myUSI.

Click the email icon.

Click the Address Book tab.

Click the Import/Export button.

Now, locate the Export section at the bottom of the window and choose the program/format that you want to export your contacts to. Probably the most compatible format is Microsoft Outlook (which, as we said, is a CSV formatted file).

Now click the Export Now button. You should see A “File Download” dialogue box (or similar) appear. In the dialogue bot, choose to “Save this file to disk” and click the OK button. In the “Save As” (or similar) dialog that appears, choose a directory where you would like to save the file.

You now have a file (the default name is CPAddressBook.csv) that is a backup of all your contact information on myUSI. You should be able to directly import it into your email program or service of choice.

Note: Importing file problems can result from fields being named different things in your email program or service than they were in myUSI or the fields may be ordered differently. One way to resolve this problem is to export your address book from your preferred email or service of choice and open both that exported (probably CSV formatted) file and opening your exported myUSI exported file in separate spreadsheets.

You should then be able to copy field data from the myUSI file into your program or service’s CSV file with little difficulty. When you are done, a simple import of the program or service’s CSV file with the additional entries from myUSI should sync everything up nicely.

We’ll have a detailed guide of these troubleshooting steps in the future.

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For more information on what’s happing with and how to get ready for the new myUSI site, go to http://usi.edu/newportal.