How to remove address books in Outlook?

Author: KellyLast Modified: 2025-04-11

When composing emails, meetings, we can easily add recipients from the Address Book. Sometimes, the address books may be too many or out of date, and make it not easy to find out proper contact. Therefore, some Outlook users think of removing some address books. In this article, I will show you two methods to remove address books from Microsoft Outlook.

Remove an address book with configuring account settings

Remove an address book with changing contact folder’s properties

Remove an address book with configuring account settings

We can find out all address books in the Account Settings dialog box, and then remove them easily. And you can do it as following:

Step 1: Open the Account Settings dialog box with:

Clicking the "Tools" > "Account Settings" in Outlook 2007.
Clicking the "File" > "Info" > "Account Settings" > "Account Settings" in Outlook 2010 and 2013.

the screenshot of step about removing address books in outlook 1

Step 2: In the Account Settings dialog box, click the "Address Books" tab, select an address book, and then click the "Change" button.

the screenshot of step about removing address books in outlook 2

Step 3: In the popping up Microsoft Outlook Address Book dialog box, click to select the address book from the "Outlook Address (Books)" box, and then click the "Remove Address Book" button.

the screenshot of step about removing address books in outlook 3

Step 4: Click two "Close" buttons to exit both dialog boxes.

Step 5: Restart your Microsoft Outlook.

Remove an address book with changing contact folder’s properties

Apart from configuring account settings, we can also change a contact folder’s properties, and remove this contact folder from Address Book easily.

Step 1: Shift to the People view (or Contact view), and right click the contact folder that you will remove from Address book, and then select the "Properties" from the right-clicking menu.

the screenshot of step about removing address books in outlook 4

Step 2: In the coming (Folder name) properties dialog box, click the "Outlook Address Book" tab, and uncheck the option of "Show this folder as an e-mail Address Book".

the screenshot of step about removing address books in outlook 5

Step 3: Click the "OK" button to close the dialog box.

After configuring, you will see the specified contact folder has been removed from the Address Book already.

Note: Both methods we introduced above will remove the contact folders from Address Book dialog box, but won’t remove the contact folders from your Microsoft Outlook.