Outlook is a popular email service for business communication and is often the first choice for large business users.
While it offers a wide range of powerful features and integrations, Outlook does not offer an easy way to analyze/extract data from emails.
Business data that comes in via email or Outlook attachments is usually manually exported to Excel spreadsheets or other business applications.
Why export emails from Outlook to Excel?
Emails contain a lot of vital business data.
Businesses receive invoices, purchase orders, receipts, quotes, sales requests and more via email. It is difficult to organize and understand all this data in Outlook itself.
Exporting email data from Outlook to Excel allows businesses to review all this data to gain valuable insights. You may also want to export Outlook emails to Excel to back up all your data or move to another email provider/server.
In this article, we look at two popular ways to export data from Outlook emails to Excel spreadsheets.
Neither of these two methods is completely perfect, to be honest – formatting is often lost or modified during export. We also look at how to automatically export Outlook emails to Excel without data loss or formatting.
Automate Outlook to Excel workflows with Nanonets. Parse email data to structured data suitable for business applications.
How to export Outlook emails to Excel?
Here are some of the most common methods to export email data from Outlook to Excel:
Manually copy-paste data from Outlook to Excel
Probably the dumbest approach here – but it still works.
Open the emails or attachments one by one, copy all relevant data and paste them into an Excel sheet. This includes all photos, images, logos and graphics included in your spreadsheet.
Direct export from Outlook to Excel
Exporting emails directly from Outlook to Excel is quite easy.
But this method will only preserve plain text and basic links – all other formatting will be lost.
- Open Point of view >> click on “File” >> and select “Open and export“
- Click on “Import Export” >> select “Export to file” >> and select Excel the Comma Separated Value (.csv) as a file type
- Select a destination folder (Contacts) to save the file
- Click “Finish”
Close Outlook, open the folder and verify the Excel/csv file you just extracted from Outlook.
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Both of the methods we’ve looked at so far require you to manually open each email one by one. These methods do not support bulk export actions.
Automate Outlook workflows in Excel
You can automate Outlook email workflows in Excel with an AI-based email analyzer or email extractor like Nanonets.
With Nanonets, you can automatically forward all incoming Outlook emails to Inbox Nanonets and analyze all the data in them. This will help you perform bulk actions without having to open individual emails or attachments one at a time.
Nanonets can also help preserve the original data formatting and extract only the specific data you need.
Automate Outlook to Excel workflows with Nanonets. Analyze email data into structured data suitable for business applications.
Take away
Exporting Outlook emails to a spreadsheet has clear advantages – for data storage as well as data analysis.
Doing this email process manually in Excel just won’t scale and is extremely time consuming.
Email analyzers and intelligent data extraction tools can help you automate Outlook to Excel workflows. You can focus more time on data analysis and less time on copying and pasting data into Excel!