Goodbye Microsoft Outlook 2011, It Was Nice Knowing You – Part 2
So after transferring my mail from Outlook 2011 to Apple Mail, the next task was to move my contacts, appointments, notes, and to-dos. I wanted to make this as painless as possible, so I leveraged something from a failed experiment to connect Outlook 2011 to iCloud. Outlook 2011 has a feature called Sync Services that was designed to sync your contacts, appointments, notes and to-dos with the Apple supplied apps. It doesn’t work with Mountain Lion which means it won’t sync with iCloud because Apple have abandoned support for Sync Services. But what it did allow me to do is to push contacts and appointment items to the Contacts and Calendar apps. I have to admit that it took a couple of tries to make it work, but I did follow the instructions in the link above to make it work.
When it comes to notes and to-dos, I had to re-enter them into Notes and Tasks. Not a bit deal as I had a few of them and I could copy and paste them easily enough.
After all of this, I have my stuff moved out of Outlook. Only one last thing to do. After a sanity check to make sure everything worked, I deleted the outlook data to get back the space that it occupied. I deleted the folder ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identities/Main Identity and its subfolders. Of course, I have a backup just in case.
For bonus points, I turned on iCloud and everything popped up into it almost instantly. Cool.
Outlook 2011 is now a distant memory.
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