Previous Art

I am not talking about this by the way: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA011165281033.aspx

Motivation

Recently, I was fiddling around with my Outlook Contacts. Originally, I was trying to import the corporate address book into my Contacts because I couldn't find a way to do a proper wildcard or substring search (because the find feature is like a regex that is automatically anchored at the beginning of the line; i.e., next to worthless) in the Address Book itself. So I took my actual Contacts and put them inside a folder called "Actual". Now, in the navigation pane on the left-hand side, Outlook doesn't show the Contacts folders in a tree, like has been done since the dawn of time. No, it flattens the tree out, making it appear as if they aren't nested at all.

When I went to do the copy from Address Book to Contacts, I accidentally selected the Actual folder and imported about 5000 random Address Book entries alongside my actual contacts. I hardly use Contacts in Outlook, except that I sync them to my Phone with ActiveSync (don't get me started, by the way). Obviously, next time I went to sync my phone, it would sync all of the garbage contacts as well, so I went through and weeded out the good contacts into another folder called "Good".

After that ordeal, wanting to forget about the foolishness of my ways, deleted the "Actual" folder. And my hand-picked "Good" folder went right out the window with it, since it was in fact a subfolder of "Actual", though there was no way of telling that because, as you'll remember, the tree is flattened. My heart sank. I had just deleted a year's worth of mostly hand-crafted contacts. Eeep.

Well, it wasn't so bad. I had only deleted them to the Deleted Items folder. But it wasn't so easy as dragging the folder back. The contacts were all in there, but they were mixed with 500-odd deleted emails and the original garbage Address Book-import contacts, because when you delete a Contacts folder, Outlook doesn't create a folder in the Deleted Items to put it under. (I love you Microsoft!) At least, not on the left-hand navigation pane...

Shut up and give me the fix already!

The thing is, the navigation pane in regular old email mode doesn't show Contacts folders, only regular folders. However, if you use the Search In > Choose Folders button on the search bar, they do! Callooh callay! So I just did a reg'lar search with the "Good" folder ticked, used " " as my search query, and Shazam! they were all there. Copied them back to my Contacts folder and called it a day.