Address Book Export Saga

I momentarily lost the contents of my address book today, and certain individuals (who shall remain nameless) used the opportunity to gloat about my misfortune, and to chalk one up for PCs/Windoze. Fortunately–just like a football player who’s team is winning the game and receives some ’stick’ from the opposition–all I have to do is “point to the scoreboard“. I’m well ahead on that score!

Anyway:I was trying to export my contacts to a .csv file and–much to my chagrin–discovered that Address Book (Version 4.0.3) can only export vCards. Problem is you can’t import vCard data format into Excel (or Spreadsheet in OpenOffice).

So, with the power of google at my fingertips, off I went in search of a utility. Sure enough, I found one via the Apple website. It didn’t have all the features I wanted, but it looked like it would do the export. Well, export it did–all of my contacts. It did not copy them out, it moved them out! Shit. And without knowing this, I trashed the export file after I discovered that the format was not particularly useful. Double shit.

Thankfully, my mobile phone proved to be my saving grace. I regularly sync the laptop with the phone and was able to use the phone’s ’send all contacts’ feature to retrieve the data. Back to normal. I also have a backup procedure in place, which was the non-preferred option as the data was probably a little older. This serves as a reminder to make sure that it is up-to-date.

Oh, and in the process, I did manage to find a nice little utility that does exactly what I want it to … AddressBookExporter-2.1.2. I recommend that you check it out for yourself if you need to export your data in the more useful text format.

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