MacOS – Outlook Identity is too large – help!

macosms office

I am an 'email packrat' I suppose, since I have emails from several years that I keep. That, combined with me trying to sync my outlook calendar with the my work Exchange calendar, and my identity file is HUGE. For many events in my calendar there are 50-100 instances of the same appointment or birthday.

Is there a way to downsize my identity file, or make my current one something like .old and start fresh with a new one?

Best Answer

This can be accomplished using the "Microsoft Database Utility"...

  1. Open MS Outlook while holding option
  2. You should see a window similar to this: Microsoft Database Utility
  3. Click the "+" sign in the lower left corner to create a new, blank, identity New Identity
  4. Once you've created and named the new identity you can set it to be the default (the one that opens when Outlook launches) by selecting it, clicking the gear icon and choosing "Set as default" Set default identity

Now, if you open Outlook it will be empty. You can add your email account/s by clicking Outlook > Preferences > Accounts and entering the appropriate information.

Alternately, you can duplicate your original Outlook identity and clean out the original or duplicate, deleting email accounts and removing "On my computer" folders, until it's empty, then re-adding accounts and info as needed. To create a duplicate identity:

  1. In Finder, browse to ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identities
  2. Select your current identity (by default it's named Main Identity), right click on it and choose "Duplicate" from the contextual menu
  3. Once it's finished copying you should have a second identity folder named "Main Identity Copy" or similar. You can rename this to Main Identity Archive, Main Identity Backup, etc.
  4. Now you can safely open Outlook and clear out whatever data and accounts you see fit until you have a fresh slate to work with. Going forward you can use the steps in the first half of my answer to select whichever identity you need, set it as default, and open Outlook to access data as needed.

Hopefully that helps!

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