Auto-complete Not Working After Outlook 2010 Upgrade

You know you love it, being able to just start typing the first few characters of an address and Outlook "guesses" the rest for you. At least I think you love it, because every time someone's Outlook is upgraded or they are moved to a new system, everyone notices it's missing right off the bat.

Prior to Outlook 2010 all this information was kept in a NK2 file, typically called Outlook.NK2. Previously you could just copy this file to the corresponding folder on a new machine and it worked almost like magic. With the new upgrade, not so much. It's not a hard process to import the auto-complete data, but there are some additional steps.

1. Copy your old *.NK2 file to C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Outlook


2. Ensure the name matches your current profile name, default is Outlook. (Look in Control Panel > Mail > Show Profiles... to be sure.)


3. Now from the Run... prompt enter: outlook.exe /importnk2 and click OK.


4. Once imported the NK2 file will have a .old extension, remove that if you wish to run the import again.

All auto-complete data is now kept within an Outlook 2010 mailbox, so no external files will be needed in the future.