M$FT is arrogant, irresponsible, abuses customers

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Jennifer Murphy

Senior Member
Outlook version
Outlook 2016 64 bit
Email Account
Office 365 Exchange
A couple of weeks ago, I was made aware that my PST never got converted to the new (Unicode) format when I upgraded to Office 2007. I was a little annoyed that Outlook never warned me that my PST was in an old, less reliable format with serious size limitations, but I assumed that M$FT had provided a conversion utility. An Internet search quickly revealed that not only is there no utility, there are not even any manual tools that really work.

I found a number of websites offering a bewildering array of “solutions”. One of them recommended running a M$FT utility called ScanPST to make sure any corruption was corrected before converting. That was a total disaster. Luckily I made a backup, because ScanPST totally hosed the PST file it was working on.

I posted a query here and got help from Diane Poremsky, without which, I could never have completed the arcane, booby-trap-ridden process. She quickly told me to abandon ScanPST.

An excellent article by Diane outlines three methods. All of them have limitations. None of them comes close to making an exact copy with all settings preserved. (sigh) I chose the manual copy method. It was a little tedious, but I got through it in about a day. There were a few folders that I had to handle manually (within the manual process), such as Drafts. I also ran into problems with my Search folders, so had to take yet another manual digression. By now, I am on day 3 or 4.

Then I noticed that none of my Views had been copied over. More research and help from Diane. I am still not 100% sure how I eventually got that to work and I am not about to try and recreate it.

Then I discovered that I hadn’t copied over my contacts, so after more research and help from Diane, I got that done.

Today, I discovered that my Categories hadn’t been copies over. An Internet search turned up several websites offering scary solutions involving Registry fixes. After another query here, Diane pointd me to another article she wrote about categories. Following those instructions, I got the categories copied over, but discovered that none of the colors were preserved. Outlook assigned random (and ugly) colors to each category. Diane has another article with a VBA macro for getting the colors right. I may try that later if I have the time and the stomach.

I have no idea how mahy more gotchas await. What I do know is that M$FT is an arrogant, irresponsible company that is either too lazy or too incompetent to write a utility to convert its own PST files. This conversion should have taken 5-10 minutes. Instead, I have spent the better part of 3-4 days and I am probably not done.

I consider this criminally irresponsible. I have come to truly hate this company.

PS: Many, many thanks to Diane. She saved me days of work and frustration and probably loss of critical data. M$FT should immediately put her in charge of customer service, if not development.
 
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