Exporting an Outlook distribution group to import into a Listserv list

Action

Follow these instructions to take a list of email addresses from a personal Outlook distribution group and convert it into a format that can be used to upload into a Listserv list.

Instructions

In Outlook, find your distribution group in your Contacts list and double-click on it to open it in a new window.

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Click File, then Save As.
Change the type from Outlook Message Format - Unicode (.msg)* to Text Only (.txt)*.
Choose a location to save this .txt file and click Save.
Open this file in Notepad by double clicking on it in the location where you saved it.
It will have some extraneous information in it that you will need to remove before it can be uploaded to a Listserv list. Remove the "header" information at the top (everything in the red box in the example below, including the extra blank lines).
After that, your file should look something like this, where the first line starts with your first person, with no extraneous information before that.
The file now contains a list of people and addresses. One more thing needs to be done before this can be used to upload to Listserv - we need to rearrange the order of the information so that the format is one email address per line, followed optionally by the person's name. (You can omit the names completely, if you'd like.)
First save the file in Notepad and then re-open it in Excel. To do this, right-click on the file in Windows Explorer, choose Open with, and choose Microsoft Excel.
The file will look like this when it opens:
Right-click on the top of column B and choose Cut.
Then right-click on the top of column A and choose Insert Cut Cells.
This will swap the columns.
Now, save the file. Excel will alert you about some feature incompatibilities, but just click Yes.
You can then close Excel. Excel will ask if you want to save changes; you can say Don't Save, since you already did.
Your file is now properly formatted for use in uploading to Listserv.