Eliminate Duplicate Items in Microsoft Outlook

Outlook is a cumbersome and unwieldy beast, but it's an essential part of many of our lives. From time to time, Outlook gets gummed up with duplicate entries -- most often, in Contacts and the Calendar.

Personally, I have no less than four identical copies of a Monday morning staff meeting stacked on top of each other, for example.

Why? Who knows. Usually this sort of thing happens as a result of synchronization errors between Outlook and various portable devices, but I'm not here to assess blame. I'm here to tell you how to fix it.

Outlook Duplicate Items Remover is a free utility that sniffs out dupes throughout Outlook automatically. The program puts the redundant entries in a separate folder so you can investigate and delete them as necessary.

I tried Outlook Duplicate Items Remover (the cool kids call it ODIR) and found that it did a good job, rooting out all the duplicates I actually knew about. Time will tell if it missed anything.

Unfortunately, though, the program isn't especially configurable. ODIR has a fixed set of properties it inspects to identify dupes. If a contact shares identical first and last names, company names, and email address, for example, it's a dupe. If everything matches except the company name, the program doesn't treat it as a duplicate. Despite that shortcoming, though, it's well worth the cost of free, and can go a long way towards cleaning up Outlook.

Dave Johnson was employed by Microsoft Corporation at the time this article was written.