Best Way to Delete Duplicate Contacts in Outlook 2010, 2013, 2016

The MS Outlook is an email application provided by Microsoft and used at a very large scale by the large and small organization as well as individuals. When it comes to the best email clients Outlook is the first choice, because it has easy to use GUI, security and advanced features. But sometimes the user can face some issues such as multiple duplicate contacts in it when they import contacts from various resources and add them to their own contact list. These duplicates don’t get deleted automatically and takes so much space in the email client storage. For a constant user of MS Outlook, it is not easy to select duplicates one by one and then remove it from Outlook address book. In this blog, we will know how to delete duplicate contacts in Outlook 2010, 2013, 2016. Follow to the end.

Manual ways to Remove Duplicate Contacts in Outlook 2010, 2013, 2016

There are two manual methods to delete duplicate contacts one for one-by-one deletion and another for multiple deletions at once, follow the methods below:

Method 1: Delete Contacts one by one

• Open Outlook and look for the ‘People‘.
• After that in ‘Current View‘ option, click on ‘Views box‘ >> ‘Phone‘ then you can find all the duplicates here.
• In the contact list, long press ‘Ctrl‘ button and then select the duplicate contacts one by one.
• Press ‘Delete‘ after selecting all duplicates.

Method 2: Delete multiple Duplicate Contacts by using the Export and Import method

• Open Outlook and go for the ‘People‘.
• On current Contacts folder, right-click and then select New Folder and Rename it.
• Go back to the folder Contacts, & to choose all contacts press (Ctrl+A).
• Now, to move contacts to the New folder, Press shortcut key ‘Ctrt+Shift+V‘>> Move to Folder and then choose new folder. (You can use drag and drop also.)
• Go to File >> Open & Export >> Import/Export.

Note: To Delete Duplicate contacts in Outlook 2010, click File >> Open >> Export and move directly to step 8.

• Choose Export to a File >> Comma Separated Values and then select the same new folder which is created earlier.
• Finally, save the file to the desired location and then click ‘Finish‘.

Import Back the Duplicate Contacts to Outlook

• Go to File >> Open >> Import and choose Comma Separated Values.
• Browse the new folder which is created earlier.
• Select the option Do not import duplicate items.
• Select the primary Contacts folder for the destination, which is empty and click on the ‘Finish‘.
• Now comes the final step to delete duplicate contacts in Outlook mailbox:

After doing all the above steps, copy all the contacts from the new folder which is created to store duplicates, to the main Contacts folder. Now, if you ever get duplicate contacts again, then a pop up will show up with two options:

•   Select Add new contact if the contact isn’t a duplicate.
•   Select Update information of selected contact if the contact is a duplicate.
• Choose the required option according to your need.
• Now, click ‘Update‘ >> ‘Update All‘to make the same option for all duplicate contacts.
• After backing up all the contacts delete the New Folder that you have created to store the duplicate contacts.

A Professional way to Delete the Duplicate Contacts in Outlook 2010, 2013, 2016

Try a professional utility to delete the duplicate contacts and other items from MS Outlook. Outlook Duplicate Remover provided by Sysinfo is the best option for such type of problem. This tool is enough able to delete the duplicate Outlook emails, contacts, calendars from PST Files. The tool entirely removes all duplicates from source PST file and helps in reducing the PST file corruption.

This tool supports multiple Outlook PST files at once & date range feature, batch removal of email Items and compatibility with various versions of Microsoft Windows Operating Systems. If you use this utility you will see that your PST mailbox become lighter and the performance of Outlook gets increased.

Conclusion

We have suggested some manual as well as professional methods to delete duplicate contacts in Outlook 2010, 2013, 2016. If you choose the manual solution it requires some extra efforts but chooses professional method there is no need for technical knowledge and takes very less time, to perform the actions. It’s all up to you which one you choose.