A special download is available from our website to help import Calendar, Contact, Task and Memo data from Microsoft Outlook into our software. (Intellect users will have a bit more work on their hands to bring in old emails from Outlook, detailed further below).
While the paid version can perform two way syncs, the free trial version of ChaosSync for Outlook works great for simply importing a copy of your data from Outlook to Chaos to get our databases jumpstarted.
The download for ChaosSync for Outlook is available from our main products page at https://www.chaossoftware.com/products.aspx .
This WILL NOT put an icon on your desktop. Instead, it must be run from inside our program, while you are looking at the data in Chaos that you want the Outlook data added to. When you restart our main Chaos program after installing ChaosSync for Outlook, there will be a new Accessories menu at the top where you will find ChaosSync for Outlook as one of the choices.
When you start ChaosSync for Outlook, on the Main tab you'll see the options for our databases, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and Projects. Next to each of these items, there is a choice to have "Outlook Import Into Chaos" or "Do Nothing". Do Nothing would be for sections you want to skip and avoid sending to our databases. Everything else that you DO want added to our databases should be set to Outlook Import Into Chaos. (Projects, by the way, is our closest equivalent to the Memos in Outlook.)
One thing about transferring Contact data from Outlook to Chaos is that while Outlook has very set-in-stone fields for Phone Numbers and Email addresses, our Chaos databases are setup to let you rearrange or re-label the phone fields as you see fit. To provide the flexibility required to transfer data from their phone fields to our customizable ones, there is a second tab at the top of ChaosSync for Outlook to adjust the "Mapping" of what fields go where.
Here's where is gets just a bit tricky: Since your phone fields in Chaos could be in whatever order you decided to make your default, the ChaosSync for Outlook refers to your fields generically by position. If you click the New button in your Contacts section, your Phone Numbers are displayed 1 through 20, top to bottom. So, you'll want to make a "cheat sheet" where you make note of what labels you have in what order, so you can double-check the mapping on the ChaosSync for Outlook tool.
When you click the Mapping tab in ChaosSync for Outlook, click on "Contacts". You'll see a list of all the Outlook fields on the left side of the screen. Scroll down to find one of the phone number or email address fields in this list and click on it once to highlight it. On the right side of the screen, you'll see the current phone number field, if any, that this Outlook field will match up with. If you need to change it, you can select a different phone number field from the drop-down list to match what you saw on a New Contact in Chaos.
If you make any changes to the Mapping, click Save to store your preferences.
If you are finished making your selections and setting the mapping, you can finally click the "Go" button at the bottom right of the Main tab in ChaosSync for Outlook. This will make all the transfers happen and add this data to the Chaos program.
When complete, you may need to refresh your main screen by changing dates or groups in your Chaos program to see all the new records appear.
If you use our Intellect program, you may also want to transfer your email history from Outlook. The good news is that when you are done, Intellect will know everything about these messages: they will be linked to contact histories, they will have all the right dates, they will have their full attachments. The bad news is that Outlook doesn't make it easy to transfer your messages out so you'll have to do work to make it happen.
To send email messages from one email program to another, you need to create .EML files. For whatever their reason, Outlook does NOT have the ability to export their messages inside their program! The good news is there are many third-party programs that can do this for them. Two programs we can mention to get you started are MailStore Home and Aid4Mail, but a Google search can locate many other choices as well. The goal is to export .EML from Outlook if you are searching for other options.
With the aid of one of these programs, you hope to have a folder on your hard drive with all your mail folders full of .EML files ready to add to Intellect.
Once you have a folder full of .EML files, adding these to Intellect is just a drag and drop away.
First, if you don't have an appropriate folder already, you should make a folder where you want these .EML files to get added to. Intellect has a folder on the left called Saved Messages, which is your area to customize and make any folders you need. Just right-click on the Saved Messages folder (or any subfolder under Saved Messages) and you can create a "New Folder".
Once you select and highlight a folder on the left side of the screen, the top right side of Intellect will show you the list of messages in this folder, if any. This list on the top right is where you will drag the .EML files to. You can highlight and drag all the .EML files at once that you want to add to this folder and Intellect will import each of them that you have dropped.
This help article applies to Intellect 4 or newer, Time & Chaos 8 or newer, and Chaos Free