How do I automatically extract data from email to Excel?

Outlook is one of the best email programs available and is the first choice for many business email users. The platform is powerful because it organizes large quantities of emails well, integrates with numerous third-party extensions, has high sending limits for commercial use, and multiple accounts are easily created and managed across a single server.

One of Outlook’s shortcomings involves an easy method for exporting emails or the ability to quickly extract data from email. There are numerous possibilities, ranging from copying and pasting individual emails into text documents to exporting into a CSV or Excel format. No option is perfect, and custom formatting is often lost during the process.

Why Export Emails?

There are really only a few reasons to export emails from Outlook. Moving your inbox to a different server and platform calls for an export when you don’t want a fresh start. And moving to a new system can lose all your important email conversations from past exchanges.

To avoid losing valuable email data, export into an Excel workbook or one of many other formats. Be aware that uploading into a readable and easily defined format on a new system is likely difficult or impossible. The Excel sheet can organize conversations and act as a database where you can search for old contacts and conversations by context or date.

The other reason to export emails is to save the data in a backup file. Sensitive information that may require a recall for legal or personal purposes is worth backing up. If your server is ever wiped clean, the Excel file will store everything from previous email conversations.

Export Emails From Outlook to Excel

Exporting emails from Outlook to Excel is easy. Keep in mind, however, that you will only retain plain text and basic links. All other formatting is lost. If you eventually want to restore formatting, saving as HTML files is a good alternative.

Open Outlook and click the “File” option, followed by the “Open and Export” option. Click “Import/Export” and “Export to a File” before setting the file type to Excel. A CSV is similar, and will transfer easily to an excel workbook later if you wish.

Finally, choose the destination folder where the file should be saved. Select “Finish” to save the emails into the specified folder. Exit Outlook and navigate to the folder. Check to ensure the file is saved and attempt to open it. The Excel workbook or CSV file should open with all the email data.

Alternative Options

Other file types are supported by Outlook, as well. The .PST label is specifically for backing up Outlook emails and other data stored on the server. The .OLM serves the same function on Mac systems. The catch here is that the file is only compatible with other Outlook emails. If you want to open or transfer the email data, it must happen within another Outlook account.

The other workaround is specific to Gmail. You can setup a Gmail account within Outlook, which essentially means you are using a Gmail server but an Outlook face to manage your emails. The systems are working together, and you can copy all the Outlook emails in the individual folders and move them to new Gmail folders. If you abandon Outlook after moving the emails, they will remain on the Gmail server.

Transferring emails from an entire business with multiple accounts is difficult, and no clear route exists for switching platforms. Integrating with a system like Salesforce that tracks all actions separately helps, because those actions remain stored on the Salesforce account. Change servers, and at least you still have the email addresses and history for each email. Otherwise, a server change is difficult and somewhat messy.

Outlook is a popular email service for business communication and is often the first choice for large business users.

While it offers a wide range powerful features and integrations, Outlook doesn't offer an easy way to parse/extract data from emails.

Business data coming in via Outlook emails or attachments is usually extracted manually to Excel spreadsheets or other business applications.

Why export emails from Outlook to Excel?

Emails contain a lot of vital business data.

Businesses receive invoices, receipts, quotes, sales requests and more via email. It's hard to organise and make sense of all that data in Outlook itself.

Exporting email data from Outlook to Excel allows businesses to examine all that data to gain valuable insights. You might also want to export Outlook emails to Excel simply to backup all your data or move to another email provider/server.

In this article we look at two popular ways to export data from Outlook emails to Excel spreadsheets.

Neither of these two methods is completely perfect, to be honest - formatting is often lost or modified during the export. We also look at how to export Outlook emails to Excel automatically without loss of data or formatting.

How to Export Outlook Emails to Excel?

Here are some of the most common methods of exporting email data from Outlook to Excel:

Manually copy-pasting data from Outlook to Excel

Probably the dumbest approach here - but it still works.

Open emails or attachments one by one, copy all relevant data and paste into an Excel sheet.

Directly export from Outlook to Excel

Directly exporting emails from Outlook to Excel is pretty easy.

But this method will only retain plain text and basic links – all other formatting will be lost.

1. Open Outlook >> click on "File" >> and select "Open and Export"
2. Click on "Import/Export" >> select "Export to a file" >> and select Excel or csv as the file type
3. Select a destination folder to save the file in
4. Click "Finish"

Exit Outlook, open the folder and verify the Excel/csv file you just exported from Outlook.

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Both the methods we've looked at so far require you to manually open each email one by one. These methods don't support any bulk export actions.

Automate your Outlook to Excel workflows with Nanonets. Parse email data into structured data fit for business applications.

Automate your Outlook email to Excel workflows

You can automate your Outlook email to Excel workflows with an AI-based email parser or email extractor like Nanonets.

With Nanonets you can auto-forward all incoming Outlook emails to a Nanonets inbox and parse all data in them. This will help perform bulk actions without having to open individual emails or attachments one at a time.

Nanonets can also help preserve original data formatting and extract only the specific data you need.

Here are the steps:

Create an account

to get started with Nanonets.

Or sign in to your Nanonets account.

Select a data parser

Depending on the types of emails you want to parse data from, create your own data parser or select one of Nanonets' pre-built data parsers.

Don't see a pre-built data parser that you can use? You can build your own email data parser with Nanonets. Just upload a few sample email screenshots (or PDFs) and mark the data fields you want to extract. The Nanonets AI will learn to identify your data of interest by analysing these samples.

Import your emails

Next, import a few emails into your data parser.

Simply auto-forward your emails to a dedicated Nanonets inbox or receiving address. And Nanonets will then capture all these emails into your data parser.

You could also set up an automatic import of files from cloud storage, databases or connect to other sources via an API.

Extract data from your emails

Nanonet's pre-built data parser extracts relevant data from the email body and/or attachment in the forwarded emails.

You can even quickly edit, review or approve the extracted data.

Export or automate workflow

Complete the process by selecting your preferred output format - Excel or csv (among other options).

You can also automate this entire workflow by specifying data enhancements/transformations, setting up approvals, and sending the final results to any business application of your choice.

Automate your Outlook to Excel workflows with Nanonets. Parse email data into structured data fit for business applications.

Takeaway

Exporting your Outlook emails to Excel has clear benefits - for data storage as well as data analysis.

Doing this process manually will just not scale and is extremely labour intensive.

Email parsers and intelligent data extraction tools can help automate your Outlook email to Excel workflows. You can focus more time on data analysis and less on copy-pasting data into Excel!

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