Yesterday I helped transfer a client’s MS Outlook data from his PC to Entourage on his new Titanium PowerBook.

How’d I do it?

I tried a number of things. First of all, I had backed up his outlook folders to a .PST file, Outlooks native archive format. But only Outlook can read a PST; Entourage can do nothing with it.

My next option was to export all his messages, contacts and calendars to CSV files. This is quite tedious. Also it would seem that any message attachments would be lost. There’s a set of shareware AppleScripts called Export-Import Entourage X that might have helped in the process, but only slightly for what I was doing.

I read somewhere that Entourage will import MBOX format, so I figured out a way to get the Outlook messages into the MBOX format: Mozilla.

1. Imported the PST into Outlook on a PC.
2. Installed a complete installation (including Mail and Newsgroup reader) of Mozilla 1.4
3. Used Mozilla’s Import tool to import mailboxes and contacts from Outlook
4. Navigated to the Documents and Settings > Application Data > mozilla > profiles folder to find the store of files that were created (including mbox-format mailboxes).
5. Copied them to the mac

Now, this isn’t quite as easy as I’d hoped, but much better than the one-by-one export to CSV that most people suggest. First off, Mozilla’s MBOX folders don’t have the .mbox extension that Entourage wants; had to go through and manually add it to each one (I’m sure with something like A Better Finder Rename I could have done that quickly, but I did it by hand).

Once that was taken care of, I just dragged each file onto the entourage icon, which led Entourage to prompt me, confirming my decision to import the mailboxes as folders. Piece of cake.

That didn’t take care of the contacts, or the calendars. For the contacts, I did use the CSV file I had exported, and I suppose that here the Entourage import scripts would have really helped, since I had to change all the default mappings myself, kind of tedious, and all the contacts end up with quotation marks around the fields.

I didn’t have time to figure out the calendars. Not terribly worried, as the client has a palm pilot that once he gets it synced should take care of all that (as well as creating cleaner address book fields).