Pulling data from 11,000 Outlook emails

Mayday1 · 10-29-2009, 08:47 AM

I have a lot of emails that contain tables filled out by people in my work group. They're cells from an Excel spreadsheet that aer copied into an email by a macro. So the same data is in the same place in all of the emails. I've been told to do a study based on the last year's worth of these emails. I only need data from 3 of the cells in the emails but to manually pull it from 11,000 email message will take me forever. Is there some mechanized way I could do this? I know I can save an individual email as a text file and if I did that I could come up with something in Excel that would read each text file in a folder. But how can I save all 11,000 emails to separate txt files automatically? Even doing that would take forever. Any know a way to do this?

**macropod** · 10-30-2009, 03:19 AM

Hi Mayday1,

Outlook supports vba, so you could use that to interrogate all the emails you're intersted it, extracting the data & loading them into any array. When it's done, it could then save the data to a csv file which you could then open in Excel (alternatively, you could use Outlook to automate Excel directly and copy the array data into a worksheet).

It's really only possible to speak in general terms as you haven't said anything about how one could reliably identify the emails of interest and the data within them that you're interested in.

Mayday1 · 11-02-2009, 04:05 PM

All these emails are in their own folder. Anybody know how to code something that will pull all the characters on row 25 of every email in a folder? Or is there a way to send all emails in a folder to a single txt file? From that I could pull out what I need.

10-29-2009, 08:47 AM	#1 (permalink)
Mayday1 Registered User Join Date: Oct 2009 Posts: 4 OS: XP Pro	Pulling data from 11,000 Outlook emails I have a lot of emails that contain tables filled out by people in my work group. They're cells from an Excel spreadsheet that aer copied into an email by a macro. So the same data is in the same place in all of the emails. I've been told to do a study based on the last year's worth of these emails. I only need data from 3 of the cells in the emails but to manually pull it from 11,000 email message will take me forever. Is there some mechanized way I could do this? I know I can save an individual email as a text file and if I did that I could come up with something in Excel that would read each text file in a folder. But how can I save all 11,000 emails to separate txt files automatically? Even doing that would take forever. Any know a way to do this?

10-30-2009, 03:19 AM	#2 (permalink)
macropod TSF Enthusiast Join Date: Apr 2008 Location: Australia Posts: 564 OS: Vista	Re: Pulling data from 11,000 Outlook emails Hi Mayday1, Outlook supports vba, so you could use that to interrogate all the emails you're intersted it, extracting the data & loading them into any array. When it's done, it could then save the data to a csv file which you could then open in Excel (alternatively, you could use Outlook to automate Excel directly and copy the array data into a worksheet). It's really only possible to speak in general terms as you haven't said anything about how one could reliably identify the emails of interest and the data within them that you're interested in. __________________ Cheers macropod (MS MVP -Word)

11-02-2009, 04:05 PM	#3 (permalink)
Mayday1 Registered User Join Date: Oct 2009 Posts: 4 OS: XP Pro	Re: Pulling data from 11,000 Outlook emails All these emails are in their own folder. Anybody know how to code something that will pull all the characters on row 25 of every email in a folder? Or is there a way to send all emails in a folder to a single txt file? From that I could pull out what I need.