Importing Contacts into Outlook

The developers at Microsoft have never been too skilled in the art of drafting error messages, and I just spent 20 minutes fighting with yet another one of them. I'm in the process of importing my contact files into Outlook 2007 and kept hitting the same wall. While trying to import an Excel 2003 file Outlook kept giving me this error:

"The Microsoft Excel file blah.bla has no named ranges. Use Microsoft Excel to name the range of data you want to import."

Sounds obvious, so I spent about 30 minutes carefully naming all the ranges I wanted to import with the proper headers. This, of course, did not work. After exporting into CSV, importing back, trying various formats, reinstalling the import filters, and more, I found the issue.

Apparently my mistake was doing what Microsoft said and naming the ranges. Brilliant.... Out of frustration I took one of my copies, selected all the data, and named the whole selected range "data".

Whamo! That worked. So if you experience this error just select the whole data set in Excel and change the name for the whole data range.

Thanks so much for the error message, it clearly helped. Next time an error conditions defaults to the last option in the array how about an error message like "We don't know why it's not working, so instead of telling you something that will waste your time, try Googling it."