Import Outlook contacts to Mac Address Book – for free

· October 2, 2009

OK – I know that a lot of stuff has been written on this. But most of these doesn’t really cut what I want. Mainly for two reasons:

  • Either you could export your contacts to CSV (comma separated text format). This causes loss of non-text data such as images etc.
  • There are some really good (I presume?) tools for this. But they all cost money… Some of the cost a lot. $49 for Outlook Contacts Exporter. My solution is free.

Don’t bother about that. Here is how you do it easily and absolutely free.

  1. Open Outlook (I’m using 2007) and go to Contacts.
  2. Mark them all, right-click and go “Send as Business Card”. This will attach all the marked contacts to a mail.
  3. Send the mail to a mailbox that your Mac can read.
  4. Open the mail and save all contacts (Save->All) to the hard drive of the Mac
  5. Use Finder to open the folder where you have stored the cards.
  6. Now drag them into Address Book

It’s a bit verbose, especially if you have many contacts. I had 238 and it took quite some time to send that mail… but hey free is free, isn’t it.

Oh yeah – for extra credits with synch-junkies like me – go to Address Book and Settings->Account and check the Synch with Google-checkbox to get this into the cloud

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