Contacts don't appear in contact book, but they appear in 'To' field. Why?

When creating a new email in Microsoft Outlook 2007 all the contact's I've ever contacted appear as they should in the 'To' field when I start to type.

The problem I'm having is I need to save them to an Excel sheet but I don't want to go through each one and type them out manually so I was going to export my address book. When I looked in the contact's section there weren't any contacts there.

How do I access the contacts that are showing up in the 'To' field?

Solution 1:

The contacts stored in the "To" field are auto-complete entries and separate from your address book.

You can find them by pressing Win+R, typing the following and pressing Enter:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Outlook

The entries are stored in the file with the extension nk2. If there is more than one file, then it will be the one that matches the name of the Outlook profile you are using.

NirSoft make an application that can export these entries into Outlook Contacts - although I have to admit I've never used it.