In a nutshell, Microsoft makes it difficult. Fortunately it -can- be done.
Don’t bother with any of Outlook’s “export as text/cvs” functions, importing these files is nearly impossible. Exporting as vCard is conveniently not an option. “Save As” vCard is possible, but you can only do it for one contact at a time. Lame!
Here’s the easy way to get Outlook to save a whole bunch of vCards for you:
- Open Outlook Contacts list.
- Select all your contacts. This may be easiest in “Address Cards” view.
- In the “Action” menu, select “Forward as vCard”.
- Wait a moment while Outlook creates a new email with all of your contacts attached to it as vCards.
- Send this email to yourself (be careful not to send it to anyone else, obviously).
- Upon receipt of this email, save all the attachments to a location your mac can access, then import them into your Mac OS X Address Book. Yay!
Like I said, don’t bother with Outlook’s “export cvs/text” or “save as” functions. They’re extremely clunky and the amount of manual clean up you need to do is insane.
Next challenge… Calendar.
Update: Calendar instructions posted here.
You, Sir are a Genius!
Made my day after trying two or three rube goldberg methods to do this including one using netscape mail . . . which did not work. one little glitch and how i solved it: when i first emailed the doc to myself using my AT&T account, i could not open the vcards in the attachment. it was saved as a winmail.dat file. However, i also emailed it to my gmail account and presto: all the attachments show up separately as vcards which i then dumped in a folder and imported into my address book. it took a while to save them as i had 840 some addresses — but wow, this saves me weeks of work and headaches and makes me glad to be a Mac again after being a PC for 15 yrs. thank you!!!
I finally got my husband to move to Mac and found all sorts of solutions to this problem. The simplicity of this solution is so beautiful, it makes me want to shout it out!! Especially after seeing all the convoluted solutions I ran across. Kudos to you!! Now I have to find more people do this to :D
Having trouble with this approach. Using Outlook 2007 on a PC, I copied contacts, went to Actions, Send Full Contact as a vCard, and then emailed to myself and downloaded to my MacBook Pro. So far so good. Opened them in my Mac address book, found all the contact details in place, but see below what appears in the Notes section of every contact when opened in my Mac address book. Can anyone help? Would hate to have manually delete every note in each of my outlook contacts.
Need to copy these in the next few days. Thank you in advance to anyone who can help!
X-MS-OL-DEFAULT-POSTAL-ADDRESS: 0
X-MS-OL-DESIGN: Work
Hi folks,
I have another suggestion that may help. I needed to load AB with my contacts info. But AB would not import from my CSV-format contacts file that I had exported from a Win XP environment. In searching around, I found this freeware at http://www.sillybit.com/abee/. It worked first time out like a charm. I have no association with the developer. Just a useful app and I made a small donation to the guy.
Hope this helps.
Awesome! It worked. Quick & smooth transfer. Thks.
I didn’t have access to the pst file and the only thing I had was the contacts exported in excel sheet from outlook. I saved the excel as text file on Mac and then used import from the Address Book application. It exported perfectly fine.
Excellent, thanks so much!!!
I was unable to do “Forward to vcard” in Outlook 2007. So I found another FREE way to transfer all contacts and calendar from Outlook 2007 to Mac Mail (without including Entourage).
For contacts: Export from Outlook in CSV format. Import this CSV file in Google Contacts. Then Export these Google Contacts to a vcard file (vcard format). Then import the vcard file into Mac Address Book.
For Calendar: xport from Outlook in CSV format. Import CSV file in Google Calendars. Then Export this Google Calendar to an iCal file. Then import the iCal file into Mac Address Book.
It looks complicated, but it’s not – works Great!
MS,
Thank you so much for your comment! I just used your method to transfer contacts from Outlook 2007 on an old computer to my new Mac! Couldn’t have done it without your help!
Thank You Thank You Thank You
Excellent but better yet (as my outlook cant send an email, i only used it to sync contacts on my PDA…)
Once step 4 is finished and you have a new mail ready to send, just
File -> Save As Attachemnts
and put all the vcards in a separate folder.
Use a USB key or whatever other means to transfer that to your mac, should work as well and at least you’re sure of not sending them to somebody else ! ;)
Thank you!! I tried the G-Mail method and it worked seamlessly! Now, if I can only find a way to transfer my e-mail over – any suggestions?
No function to easily inport into a macbook pro from one of the most popular email programs in the world? That is not a MSFT problem, it is Apple not designing well. First mac in family and it is nothing but a hassle to do even basic functions. Already replaced safari since many sites do not even work. Wife insisted on 17 inch pro but thank god she got her’s first – it saved me from buying the 13 inch version of her macbook. I will stick to stuff that works. Now that I have used both, it is plain that macs’ are a lot of hype. INtuitive? Hardly. Try doing work without a right click option and see how fun that is!
Just wondering if you could go one step further and explain where I save all the attachments of addresses. It works perfect except I can only save one address at a time to my mac. I am brand new to mac so am very slow at doing everything as I have been on a pc for 20 years.
Does anyone know how to export contacts with custom fields created in outlook? Apparently Outlook let’s you create custom fields but only lets you export the default fields…what kind of sense does that make?
Just wondering if you could go one step further and explain where I save all the attachments of addresses. It works perfect except I can only save one address at a time to my mac. I am brand new to mac so am very slow at doing everything as I have been on a pc for 20 years.
Just click on save button In mail. the files will go to your download folder. select them all and drag the into you address book.
Excellent solution Sir.. Good Job.
I have saved all the v cards into the download file.
In Address Book, I go to import and find all the v cards, I can only highlight one card so I use “edit/select all” but I can only ever import one card at a time.
I have tried highlighting and dragging into address book but again it only wants to move one card. Please tell me what I’m missing here.
Nix that I’ve done it by dragging all the names to “All Contacts”
Apologies……..brilliant, thanks so much!
outlook does not even give me the option in “actions” to “forward as Vcard”
any pointers on this issue???
For me, once the vcard is sent, Leopard cannot read .dat file in address book. Any suggestions?
I’m a new Mac user. This Outlook to Mac thing is a real hassle. I have tried three different approaches that are described above and nothing has worked out. Forget seemless.
#1 The Outlook “Action” to Forward as a vCard sounded great but I do not find the “FOrward as a vCard. I see a Send Full Contact and then a “In Internet Format (vCard). So I try it and get a Cannot create file: Olktmp.vcf…Right-click the folder you want to create….. bla bla bla…
#2 I then try the “for contacts”: Export from Outlook in CSV format. Import this CSV file in Google Contacts. I cannot even find a CSV format do they mean “vcs”? In any event, I do not see that under the “export options”.
Help
Easy way if you have an iPhone: Sync your iPhone contacts (be selective on the Info tab of iTunes) with iTunes for Windows. It can pull contacts from Outlook. Then sync the iPhone with iTunes for Mac and choose the Merge option. Your Outlook, iPhone, and Mac contacts will all be the same!
EUREKA ur a genious
Thx, this has definitely made my day!
_______________________
wtf
Needing help on this, too. Just swicthed to Mac and am about to leave my job that has a Microsoft Exchange Server. All my contacts and calendar stuff is in Outlook and I need to get it on my new Mac. I cannot seem to get these items to sync onto my iTunes, even though I have those boxes checked. Maybe they’re in iTunes, but they are not showing up in my iCal or address book on the Mac. Is there another step I’m missing? It seems like everything on my iPhone that belongs to the Exchange Server is in it’s own separate category on the phone. Please help!
I am a PC user with over 2000 contacts in Outlook and about 10 user-created “categories” in addition to the standard Outlook categories. It sounds like most people on this forum are transferring much smaller less complicated contact files. Apple said they can go right into MS Entourage for Macs, but the guy with whom I spoke was honest — he said Entourage crashes just as much as Outloook. Apple suggested Bento, but said that I’d have to hand-enter all the categories. Has anybody tried this? Also I’ve heard that Apple Mail can’t handle this kind of volume. Any comments, suggestions? I haven’t bought a Mac yet, and won’t unless I know this is a solvable problem.
Thanks!
Karin
THANK YOU SO MUCH. SO SIMPLE AND STRAIGHTFORWARD. SAVED ME HOURS!
After many hours trying the CVS and other exports from Outlook, the solution that worked the best was to export Outlook to GMAIL then export from GMAIL to a vfile format and import to Address Book on the Mac. It really took only minutes and I had over 500 contacts. If you have to open a Gmail account to do it, don’t hesitate it’s easy and actually their email is quite good. I switched to GMAIL after a PC disaster that wiped out all my emails. Fortunately I had save my contacts to my Blackberry and was able to restore them. Now they are on my Mac and I am one happy lady!
This solution was great not to mention very elegant! I had a few issues doing it with my “mobile me” account so I sent them to my AOL (yes! I still use AOL for my mail) and it worked like a charm. I have to concur with previous commentes… You sir, are a genius!!!
Worked like a dream…thanks so much.
Worked like a charm – 1200 contacts – zoom!
Thanx
I found this tip on another website. You can merge all of you vCard files into one. Place all vcf files into one directory and then run this command:
copy /B *.vcf all_in_one.vcf
Hi Lucas,
Your help to get my contacts from MS Outlook 2007 from my XP desktop into my Address folder in my Macbook would be really much appreciated.
You say to open the action menu and click Forward as vcard. But in my version of MS Outlook 2007 under the Action menu there is nothing that sais Forward as vcard, nor under any of the other menus.
If you can help me out of this dilemma, I would be most obliged to you.
Many thanks and best regards,
Stuart.
I tried the proposed method but found that not all of the fields I needed were transferred in VCF format.
I, too, had lots of problems with mapping CSV fields. Also found the Netscape 7.2 converson missed fields. Managed to get my new MacBook Pro to dump a few times – thought Macs were supposed to be immune from that!
Didn’t try the GMail option but that would have been next after Sunil’s suggestion (above) of: http://www.sillybit.com/abee/.
Worked a treat first time and even allowed me to customise the names I wanted in my fields. ALL the data went.
To Stuart: I had the same problem:
Hi Lucas,
“Your help to get my contacts from MS Outlook 2007 from my XP desktop into my Address folder in my Macbook would be really much appreciated.
You say to open the action menu and click Forward as vcard. But in my version of MS Outlook 2007 under the Action menu there is nothing that sais Forward as vcard, nor under any of the other menus.”
I found the work around to be that you go to the action menu and choose “Send Full Contact” then choose “In Internet Format (vCard)”
(This does the same thing as what Lucas instructions for a prior version of Outlook)
Hope this helps.