outlook truncating contact notes

Question

My classic outlook desktop app, or simultaneous use of new outlook store app, has led to the many of my contact entries where i kept a lot of contact related details in the Notes section being truncated down to appx 10 lines where i used to have 30-50 lines of details.

Anyone know of whether or not this is a known issue and if there is some method for accessing prior versions of contacts so i can recover those Notes?

Answer 1

Hi @Vivian thank you for the follow up and the tests to try and reproduce this.

In my case i'm only looking to see if I can see all the contact data in the classic outlook desktop app which is also where I originally authored / added it all. I have never edit these contacts in outlook.com web app or new outlook store app although I have tried viewing them from those apps to see if I get a different result.

I just tried your test in classic outlook desktop app if a ctrl+a > ctrl+c while having cursor in three different affected classic outlook desktop app contact's Notes field. Followed by a ctrl+v while having the cursor in a new notepad app document to see if the content is there and just hidden but displays when notepad strips off special characters that would be hiding it. No luck only see what I see in the classic outlook desktop app contact Notes view.

What I'm gathering from other posts is that one or all of the outlook options [ web app, desktop app, store app ] are now truncating contact Notes based on number of characters. Given that I might expect that is one reason why your many lines with just a 1-2 digit number followed by carriage return and line feed characters [ \r\n ] doesn't trigger this issue of truncating after a specific character count of Notes field content is reached.

I did a test with three of my contacts where Notes field got truncated sometime in the past year. While having cursor in Notes field I did a ctrl+a > ctrl+c and then pasted that into a character + word + line counting web app. The three I tested were showing 970, 986 and 992 characters, probably not accounting for carriage return + line feed characters [\r\n] what would add 2 more characters per line breaks.

So it seems around 1000 characters is the truncation point that has surfaced in the past year. Something I and others could test to see if a repro can be produced. It might not be classic outlook desktop app that is truncating I could be just opening for viewing in outlook.com web app and/or new outlook store app causes the truncation to happen.

Answer 2

Hi myusrn,

Thanks for sharing, I also learnt a lot from your test😊 and I realised why my Notes field content not reaching a specific number of characters would not trigger the truncation issue. Regarding your comment that it seems that around 1000 characters is the truncation point that occurs, I will also try more times with you to verify this issue.

Have a nice day.

Best regards

Vivian - MSFT | Microsoft Community Support Specialist

Answer 3

Hi myusrn,

Thank you for using Microsoft products and posting in the community.

I realize that your outlook is truncating contact notes, I will do my best to help you!

You mentioned that you use both the classic outlook desktop app and the new outlook shop app, I tried to add a contact just like you did and added 60 lines of notes for this contact, I found that when I added it in the classic outlook, it showed up fine in both the new outlook and the web outlook. However, when I clicked "Edit Contact" in new outlook, it only showed part of it (not the full text of the note), but when I chose "ctrl+A" and pasted all the content of the note into notepad, I found that the content was complete, not part of it. It's not part of it. So it could just be that there's a lot of information, and under the "edit" function, the display is incomplete, but the actual content of the note is the full 60 lines (test).

classic:

new:

web:

I'm not sure if your clearing is the same as mine, you can try to select "ctrl+A" in the "Edit Contact" function, paste all the contents of the note into Notepad, and check if there are any missing contents. If this is the case for you, then this is a page display problem, and does not affect the actual content of the contact notes.

Note:

Thank you for your patience and support. I hope that the above information is helpful to you. If you have any more questions, feel free to get back to me and let me know how you're doing, I'd love to help!

Have a nice day.

Best regards

Vivian - MSFT | Microsoft Community Support Specialist