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5
Sep
Outpod is a program to do bulk exports of contact and calendar information from Microsoft Outlook to files according to the vCard and vCalendar standard.
In generalOutlook supports the vCard and vCalendar format. Unfortunately a function to store more than one contact at a time as a vCard is missing from Outlook. This is the same for appointments. This tool allows you to export multiple contacts/calender events into one vcard file.
Installation
Installation is very easy. Just download the version you want, and unzip the file to a directory on your PC. The name of the executable is Outpod.exe.
Start
On startup Outpod connects to Outlook and reads the top-level folder information. Every time you expand a node in the folder-tree the subfolders are read from Outlook. When you select a folder, that contains contacts or appointments, the information is displayed in the list view on the right side of the screen.
Export data
To export the informations from Outlook, you first need to select the items you want to be saved. If you want to store the items in one single file, select the menu item Outpod->Save selected items to single file. In this case Outpod asks you for the name and location of the file. If you select the menu item Outpod->Save selected items, Outpod asks you for the location of the target directory and creates one file per item in this directory.
Calendar information
With Apples iCal you can organize your appointments in different calenders and export or publish them separately. The iPod supports this as well. Every calender is displayed on an iPod as an entry in the menu Extras->Calendars. Outpod supports this in a very sophisticated manner. Outpods behaviour is set using the options dialog. You can see this dialog by selecting Extras->Options.
If you activate the checkmark Save calendar info, calendar information is stored with the appointments. If this is deactivated Outpod behaves like version 0.3. You can choose between using the calendar names or the categories to specify the iPod-calendar of your appointments. If you choose Use category info and activate One appointment for every category, then every appointment that belongs to more than one category is stored once for every category it belongs to. E.g. you have an appointment that belongs to the categories Personal and Car, the target file will contain two copies of this appointment. One with calendar set to Personal, the other with calendar set to Car.
In case of errors
If you encounter an error or a problem during your work with Outpod, please restart Outpod with the commandline option -debug. Reproduce all your steps to get the error. Then look in the Outpod directory for the file Outpod.csl. Send this file to outpod@stoer.de.
