Extract text from personal address books (PAB)
To convert PAB address books to another format, you need Microsoft Outlook or other Data software.
To convert other file formats to the "Personal Address Book" file type, you need software like Microsoft Outlook or a similar tool.
The .PAB file format is a proprietary Personal Address Book used by legacy versions of Microsoft Outlook (prior to 2010) and Microsoft Exchange Server. It stores local contact information, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, and custom distribution lists. A secondary, minor use for .PAB files is as a backup job script containing SQL instructions for PowerArchiver.
The main disadvantage of the .PAB format is that it is entirely obsolete. Modern versions of Outlook cannot open, import, or natively interact with these files. Users are often forced to install a legacy email client like Outlook 2007 or use a specialized recovery tool just to access their old contacts. The file uses a proprietary binary database structure, meaning standard text editors or modern web browsers cannot read the encoded data.
To make this old contact data usable today, you must convert the .PAB file. The best target formats are CSV (Comma Separated Values), which allows you to view the contacts in Excel and import them into modern email clients like Gmail, or VCF (vCard) for importing individual contacts into mobile phone address books. Keep in mind that proprietary Outlook formatting and complex legacy distribution lists might be flattened or lost during extraction.
Because .PAB is a closed, proprietary database format, standard online converters usually fail to process it. Often, only the original Microsoft software can properly read or export the structured contact data reliably. If our analysis detects underlying readable text or supported embedded formats, we can help extract your data.
Convert.Guru analyzes your PAB file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted TXT, PUB, XLSX, SAV, ZIP, EMF, THMX and EMZ files.
If you want to convert PAB file to CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT, DB or SQL, you can use Microsoft Outlook or similar software from the "Legacy Contact Storage" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to PAB, try Microsoft Outlook or another comparable tool in the "Legacy Contact Storage" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our PAB converter.