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 Import Contacts From MS Outlook 
 
 
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Old 09-01-2005, 09:38 AM
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I have large contact list in MS Outlook. How do I import into Address Book? Address book seems happy to deal with vCards but no obvious way to send vCards ex Outlook en-mass?
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Old 09-01-2005, 10:22 AM
www.lukeintas.net

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Location: Hobart
This is the process, according to David Pogue's Mac OS X: The Missing Manual -
Quote:
The Windows-to-Address Book Journey

Getting names and addresses out of one Mac program andinto another is one thing, but what if your contacts are stored on a [I}Windows[/i] computer running Microsoft Outlook — the most-used contact manager in the world?

Fortunately, there's a way to grab all of those phone numbers and email addresses out of Outlook and slide them into Address Book without having to manually re-enter any of the information — but thejourney isn't exactly a one-click operation. Outlook for Windows, it turns out, can't export contacts as .vcf files (the format that Address Book requires for import) as a group — only one by one, and who's got the time for that?

The easiest way is to email yourself all your contacts. For reasons known only to a handful of Microsoft engineers, Outlook can't export contacts as vCards, but it can email them as vCard attachments. Select all of your contacts in Outlook, then choose Action->Forward as vCard. You'll end up with an email containing lots of little .vcf attachments. Send this email to yourself, then open the message and drag the attached .vcf files straight into Address Book. (If you have more than a couple of hundred contacts, you might want to do them in a few batches, rather than create an email with 700 attachments.) Odd though it is, this is the least labour-intensive way to import a large number of Addresses from Outlook.

There's one other option, but it requires that you have either Outlook Express or Entourage on your Mac. Use Outlook's Export command to create a tab-delimited text file containing all your contacts, then copy the text file to your Mac. Address Book can't do anything with this text file, but Outlook Express and Entourage can.

Chose File->Import in either program to get the process going. You'll have to step through an ugly import dialog boxlike the one shown here [image not included] to map the Outlook fields to the Mac program, but you should be able to successfully get all your contacts transferred intact. The final step is to use the Import Addresses script described in the "Importing Addresses" section above [mentioned section not included] to move the addresses from Outlook Express or Entourage into Address Book.
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Old 09-01-2005, 05:28 PM
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Thanks luke-in-tas. I had sort of worked out that posting en-mass the VCards was the way to go - but it did not seem to work for me, but in fact the relevantmail window was hiding away behind some other stuff. I have noticed however that where Outlook contacts have multiple email accounts - this process only picks up the first email address. Must go now to open a few hundred VCards! <_<

Will try & get the Pogue book from the local library!
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