How in the Tech

Editing and correcting Outlook’s auto-complete address entries

By Adam Myers ⋅ June 25, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Microsoft Outlook

Microsoft Outlook, like many other email software, contains many niceties that help increase efficiency when using the application. Users of Outlook have likely noticed it’s ability to auto-complete email addresses as the user begins typing in the To field of an email composition. Outlook, over time, assembles a list of addresses you have sent mail to and attempts to speed up future correspondence by suggesting matching addresses as you type. This internal address book is attached to your user profile so typically a new profile or Windows install will purge the contents collected. This is why you should never rely on this feature as your sole address book, it’s not a permanent data store like the address book feature exposed through Outlook directly!

A situation that is likely to occur however is how to correct errors or otherwise remove entries that have been captured previously. If you were sending an email to John and instead of using john@gmail.com you instead typed john@gmial.com Outlook will now provide both options in the auto-complete list as you beginning typing john@… Annoying! In a simple example like this, you probably know you can highlight the incorrect entry and delete it outright using the delete key. This is acceptable for one-off problems but it quickly becomes tedious for than a few; furthermore, it’s not possible to edit any entry to correct a typo – it’s delete or nothing.

NK2Edit is a free utility from NirSoft that provides an editable interface to Outlook’s internal auto-complete addressbook listings, not unlike a nice Excel spreadsheet view. Columns can be searched and sorted to allow for easy locating of the offending entries which you can then correct immediately. In addition to fixing erroneous information, NK2Edit can export the addressbook which you can then transport to a second Outlook install, a process that isn’t impossible without, but it’s insanely simple with NK2Edit! When you are happy with all your edits, just save the results in order for Outlook to pick up the changes – ensuring Outlook is already closed during the editing process of course.

NK2Edit works on any version of Windows and can read, write, and create NK2 files for Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, and Outlook 2010.

Download NK2Edit