Export Selected Entries of Address Book

[Marc Harmon]

Export
How can I export as a text file, only certain selected entries from the
Address Book. I see how to do it as an Entourage Archive, or the whole
address book, or name and email addresses only dragging and dropping a
group, but not all the data of entries in a particular category, or
highlighted (selected) names.

Import
I've opened a document in Word of names, addresses (postal & email), phone,
etc. in a table that may have been originally made in Word Perfect and saved
as a Word doc from that application on windows. I'm not sure. Entourage
import says it is not tab or comma delimited and try another. Textwrangler
shows a red upside down question mark for the spaces between entries. If I
open the whole doc in Excel, each table entry ends as a single entry in only
the first column thus many rows. If I paste selected sections, it enters
each name in two rows due to multiple addresses for home and work which
imports in a messy way.

To get this into Entourage as I am doing so far is taking much time.
Any suggestions?

 

[Allen Watson]

Export
How can I export as a text file, only certain selected entries from the
Address Book. I see how to do it as an Entourage Archive, or the whole
address book, or name and email addresses only dragging and dropping a
group, but not all the data of entries in a particular category, or
highlighted (selected) names.

Not much of an Entourage answer here; there is no easy way to do this in
Entourage. You can export a bunch of contacts as individual vcards, and then
use a script to append all the files together. The shell command "cat" can
be used with the append operator:

cat file1 >> file2

Will append the contents of file1 to file2. So you could do this that way.
Or if you have TextWrangler, you could open one file, position the cursor at
the end, and then repeatedly use "Insert->file contents" to append all the
remaining files. Of course that could be automated with AppleScript or
Automator.

However, Apple Address Book will allow you to drag a group to the desktop.
If I create a group there called "Friends" and drag contacts into that
group, and then drag the group to the desktop, it creates a text file
containing the VCF data for all the contacts. You can then open this file in
TextEdit or another text editing program to do as you wish, although it will
be identified as an Address Book file by default.

Therefore, the easiest way is to turn on synchronization in Entourage to
sync contacts to Address Book (Apple), let them sync, and then do your
export from Apple Address Book.

Import
I've opened a document in Word of names, addresses (postal & email), phone,
etc. in a table that may have been originally made in Word Perfect and saved
as a Word doc from that application on windows. I'm not sure. Entourage
import says it is not tab or comma delimited and try another. Textwrangler
shows a red upside down question mark for the spaces between entries. If I
open the whole doc in Excel, each table entry ends as a single entry in only
the first column thus many rows. If I paste selected sections, it enters
each name in two rows due to multiple addresses for home and work which
imports in a messy way.

To get this into Entourage as I am doing so far is taking much time.
Any suggestions?

The red upside down question mark is no doubt some strange delimiter
character. I'd suggest making a copy of the file to muck around with, and
then use Text Wrangler to do a global replace of the red question mark with
a tab character. To do that, select the red question mark, copy, and then
paste it into the Find window.

Then, try the import again. Make sure you save the edited file as plain
text.

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

Export
How can I export as a text file, only certain selected entries from the
Address Book. I see how to do it as an Entourage Archive, or the whole
address book, or name and email addresses only dragging and dropping a
group, but not all the data of entries in a particular category, or
highlighted (selected) names.

Import
I've opened a document in Word of names, addresses (postal & email), phone,
etc. in a table that may have been originally made in Word Perfect and saved
as a Word doc from that application on windows. I'm not sure. Entourage
import says it is not tab or comma delimited and try another. Textwrangler
shows a red upside down question mark for the spaces between entries. If I
open the whole doc in Excel, each table entry ends as a single entry in only
the first column thus many rows. If I paste selected sections, it enters
each name in two rows due to multiple addresses for home and work which
imports in a messy way.

To get this into Entourage as I am doing so far is taking much time.
Any suggestions?

You could get my Export-Import Entourage scripts at

MacScripter.net <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

It will do the Export by selection, category, etc. etc.

The Import sounds strange because there's obviously something very
unorthodox about that document (probably mangled coming from another
application), But if you can manipulate it in Excel so that it appears
correctly (experiment in Excel with Data/Import External data, trying to
find the correct delimiters, before having to manipulate manually within the
spreadsheet) then the Excel Clean Save Text and Other Contacts to EvX
scripts, or Excel Import Adapter scripts in the same package will enable you
to also Import into Entourage. Read the ReadMe (Excel and Other Programs
sections).

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

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