As repeated several times, Gmail is now the most important e-mail service and a Google account, willy-nilly, becomes mandatory if you want to take advantage of the many free services offered by the Mountain View house, including services for Android smartphones. The Gmail address book then becomes the main place to store the phone book and email addresses, so you can browse it anywhere, from your mobile phone or computer.
Those who use the Microsoft Outlook program as an email client to manage, read and send mail from the Windows PC or as a corporate email account, can synchronize the contacts of the Gmail address book with that of Outlook using one of the methods described in this guide, thus to be able to import contacts from Outlook to Gmail and vice versa.
READ ALSO: Contact management on Google address book
With the methods described below we will be able to synchronize the two address books of Gmail and Outlook, so as to make them identical, but if we wanted to access them separately we can do so by opening the specific sites.
The Gmail address book can be viewed both from the Gmail page and from the Google Contacts online site; if we look for the Outlook address book instead, we can view it from the Outlook People online site.
1) Windows 10 contacts
A very quick way to have all the contacts in a single address book on your PC is to use the Contacts app, integrated in all Windows 10 and ready to be used immediately.
We open the Start menu at the bottom left, then type Contacts with the keyboard, so as to display the right app to open.
We open this app and, in the screen that we will see, click on Import contacts in the center.
A window will appear asking you to add the accounts on which to display the contacts: just add the Outlook or Exchange account (it may already be present, especially if we are logged in with a Microsoft account to the system) and finally also add the Google account by clicking on the Google button.
At the end we will have a list of contacts generated by the two accounts, with which we can also "merge" the duplicate contacts.
The contacts added to this app will be immediately synchronized in the Outlook account, so we won't have to worry about losing them (they will always be with us wherever we connect).
2) Windows 10 mail
We can view the contacts saved on our accounts using the Mail app included in Windows 10.
To open it, simply go to the Start menu at the bottom left and type Mail, until the specific app to open appears.
In the welcome window we insert both email accounts (Outlook and Gmail), then wait for the synchronization to end.
If we add the accounts in the Mail app for Windows 10, the Outlook and Gmail contacts will be automatically saved in the Contacts app of Windows 10, so just open the latter to find and better manage all the contacts (perhaps by joining the duplicates) .
3) Outlook4Gmail
Outlook4Gmail is a free add-in for Outlook that allows you to keep the Microsoft Outlook and Gmail address books automatically synchronized.
This add-on allows you to import the name, company, telephone, email addresses, home or office address, dates, known people and other details of the various contacts in the address book from Gmail and Gmail.
The installation is done like any Windows program and can be used on any version of Outlook (MS Outlook 2003 (11.5.x), 2007 (12.x), 2010 (14.x), 2013 (15.x) supported, 2016 (16.x) and is compatible with Office 365).
The first thing to do is to indicate the account credentials and then login name and password.
As seen, for greater security, it is convenient to generate a specific password for this application using two-step verification for accessing Gmail.
Once the accounts have been added, you can specify the options to be used, then decide whether to import Outlook contacts into Gmail or whether to copy the Gmail address book into Outlook and finally whether to delete or keep existing contacts.
Outlook4Gmail has a function to keep the address books synchronized over time, automatically, by selecting the corresponding option.
Synchronization can be unidirectional or bidirectional, so as to update the accounts simultaneously and make a merger between the two sections.
During the synchronization process, you can press the View History button to check that the addon is working well and importing contacts.
Outlook4Gmail allows the synchronization of an unlimited number of Google Mail address books at the same time, therefore, if you have multiple Gmail accounts, they can all be kept synchronized.
4) GO Contact Sync Mod
If there are problems with the methods described so far, we can use GO Contact Sync Mod as an alternative, an independent and open source program that allows the import of the Gmail address book into Outlook (and vice versa).
With Go Contact Sync you can choose whether to also synchronize the cancellations between the two address books, to merge the address books favoring that of Outlook or that of Gmail (if there are two identical contacts) or whether to only import the address book from Gmail to Outlook or the other way around.
A light, fast and practical program that we can use in any area, even professional, without necessarily depending on the Outlook program (which we remember is included in the paid Office suite).
5) Manual method
If we want to manually synchronize the Gmail account in Outlook, we will have to carefully follow the steps described below for the correct outcome of the operation.
We open the Google Contacts page on the browser and click on More in the sidebar until we see the Export item.
We choose the group of contacts to export, then we set the CSV Outlook export format (for importing into Outlook or other applications). When prompted, choose Save As and move to the location where you want to save the file.
In Outlook we choose File > Open and Export > Import / Export, then we use the item Choose Import data from other programs or files > Next .
Now choose comma separated values > Next and, in the Import file window , select the CVS file in which the Gmail contacts have been saved.
We specify how duplicate contacts are to be handled and click Next .
In the Select a destination folder window, scroll to the beginning, if necessary, and select the Contacts folder, then click Next and click Finish .
READ ALSO: Import vCards (file.vcf) into Windows contacts and in Microsoft Outlook
