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Sync iPhone contacts to Outlook for Mac and vice Versa

A seemingly simple problem, right? How could this be difficult. Surely there’s more than one person out there that’s tried this.

You would think that if Microsoft supports office for mac, then surely apple would support syncing between iPhone and outlook for mac products.

NOPE!

Long story long, Apple use to have a utility that would allow syncing between outlook 2011 and iphones called isync (which is why there’s so much confusion on this issue). iPhone syncing is definitely supported in outlook for PC, but definitely not for mac. It was discontinued in Mavericks and El Capitan for an unknown reason. There has been no solid replacement for the software and the current apple position on syncing with outlook for mac is no support whatsoever. Microsoft’s position on the issue is no support. And, gmail’s position on the issue is no support.
It took a few weeks but I finally found a way to sync contacts from and iPhone to Outlook for Mac. I tried several different experimental methods to allow syncing between iPhone and outlook for mac. Eventually I landed on one method in beta, that will allow syncing between outlook for mac, gmail and iPhone, and vice versa, but it requires a few steps to resync your contacts each time. Here’s how:
Download a free trial of CompanionLink for outlook .
Setup a gmail account
Setup your gmail account on your outlook for mac and iPhone
Once everything is setup use CompanionLink to sync to your outlook, and iPhone to sync to and from gmail.
Essentially gmail contacts become the master storage, everything syncs to gmail, and then both outlook and iPhone have to pull from gmail each time you’d like contacts to sync.
There’s also the high probability of duplicates the first time the outlook application and the iPhone sync. But I’ve tested it on a new iPhone and a fresh install of outlook 2016 for mac with a new gmail account, and it works in each direction.
Goodluck!