[Hooked on My BB]

Hello Blackberry gurus, I'm afraid I've made a mess. I've been trying and trying to get Outlook 2003 (which has tons of outdated contacts) to properly sync with my BB 8300 (whose contacts are nicely updated), but the result was only that the BB kept trying to take in all of the outdated contacts from Outlook!

Because my BB has all of the contacts I want, and I had run out of things to try, I just went into Outlook and DELETED every single contact there, thinking that I'd just use the "Export" function in Synchronize and re-populate Outlook with all of my correct BB contact entries. And we'd live happily ever after.

Unfortunately, even when I chose "Export" rather than "Synchronize," my Outlook would only accept the 6 records that I had changed since my last effort to sync (yesterday). So now my entire Outlook contacts list has only six records, instead of over 900! I've searched all over the web for an answer. If I could figure out how to export my Blackberry backup files into Excel, then I could import them back into Outlook, but I can't find a way to do that either. Nothing seems to recognize the BB backup files.

Help! (and Thanks!)

[ezrunner]

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry8700/4.2.1 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/100)

There is a program that can read an convert .ipd files!

I think it can be found in the BBFaq.

Then you can place into excel.

Your BB should be able to sync with outlook tho

[JSanders]

The program is called ABC Amber Converter
Free download ABC Amber BlackBerry Convertor, convert IPD files to CHM, PDF, HTML, Word, Access, Excel, CSV, IPD Extractor

yes, you should be able to push ONLY contacts from the BB to the Outlook. Look in your Desktop Manager > Sync settings.

[JSanders]

Synchonize
> Configuration Tab
> Configure Sync button
> Highlight Address Book
> click CHOOSE button
> Choose Microsoft Outlook
> click radio button SYNCHRONIZE

Data from both should sync to both.

Make CERTAIN also at
> Highlight Address Book
> Configure
> Advanced Settings
> Conflict Resolution Tab
> Notify me if conflicts occur.
(if MS Outlook "wins", it will not copy over data from BB to Outlook)

That should work without having to dissect your IPD file.

[Hooked on My BB]

Hey, you all ROCK! Problem solved -- here's what happened. When I had done these steps:

Synchonize
> Configuration Tab
> Configure Sync button
> Highlight Address Book
> click CHOOSE button
> Choose Microsoft Outlook
> click radio button SYNCHRONIZE

I had clicked the radio button to EXPORT from the Blackberry, thinking that I didn't want to synchronize all of the messages I had just deleted from Outlook (thereby deleting them from my Blackberry!) But that didn't happen. I changed the select back to SYNCHRONIZE and it worked perfectly.

Thanks so much to all of you who responded with help. I had truly looked everywhere for the answers. Hope one of these days I'll be able to help others as well.