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Moving Outlook 2003 contacts to Address Book Apps
Tue, Feb 24 2004 at 9:31AM PST • Contributed by: Joxer
I recently bought a new G5 and could never find a working solution or app to properly move my Outlook 2003 contacts complete with all the data to the Mac Address Book.

After some experimenting here's the solution I came up with; highlight all your contacts in OL 2003 select 'Actions' at the top and then scroll down to 'Forward vCard'. At this point you could send them via e-mail to your Mac or once all the vCards are in the body of the message you can save them to a folder on your Mac or on a disk. Afterwards simply drag and drop the vCards directly into your Mac Address Book.
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Moving Outlook 2003 contacts to Address Book | 12 comments | Create New Account
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Moving Outlook 2003 contacts to Address Book
Authored by: matx666 on Tue, Feb 24 2004 at 6:04PM PST
Very useful. I tried doing this a few weeks back at work for someone, but the "Export-Import" menu option only lets you export as a"file" or import a vCard, but not export as vCard. Very frustrating. And all this time the option was there hidden in the "action" menu. Now it's easier to move from PC to Mac, or just sync those work PCs with Mac laptops.

:)

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Moving Outlook 2003 contacts to Address Book
Authored by: scott2667 on Thu, Oct 20 2005 at 11:49AM PDT
Awesome hint ....worked perfectly....saved me tons of typing and time. Thanks!!!

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Moving Outlook 2003 contacts to Address Book
Authored by: gforce on Tue, Aug 8 2006 at 8:08AM PDT
Here's an alternate solution. A bit of a workaround but it's free.
Download Thunderbird and import your Outlook contacts into Thunderbird. Then export contacts to a .ldif. Transfer the .ldif file to your Mac and import the .ldif to Address book.

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Moving Outlook 2003 contacts to Address Book
Authored by: j0ram on Tue, Sep 5 2006 at 6:48AM PDT
New to mac
Tried the csv file from outlook 2003 to my intel mini and it worked fine, then exported the addresses from my mini to my new intel imac...seamless.

Tried to do the same thing with my wife's contacts on xp and it didn't work. Tried using Thunderbird as the interface between the 2 machines and it worked...only problem was I found discrepancies between OL 2003 and Thunderbird (some contacts missing, some extra contacts???).

This solution eliminates any third part application or utility and makes better sense. Will definitely try this out. Thanks for the tip.

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Moving Outlook 2003 contacts to Address Book
Authored by: oolith on Mon, Jan 7 2008 at 11:52PM PST
Excellent. Simple. Quick. Does exactly what it says on the tin. Saved a lot of time. Thanks!

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Moving Outlook 2003 contacts to Address Book - W/O INTERNET ACCESS
Authored by: bcometa on Wed, Jan 23 2008 at 4:24PM PST
FYI... if you don't have an internet connection, or don't want to send this via e-mail, there's another solution:
- follow previous instructions so you have an e-mail ready to send with all vcard attachments
- go to file: save all attachments
- select a folder

Now all the contacts have been converted to vcard and saved on your local hard drive. You can now move with flash drive or burn to cd and move to your mac.

Hope this helps someone,
Brian Cometa

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Moving Outlook 2003 contacts to Address Book
Authored by: drugballad111 on Wed, Jul 16 2008 at 12:15PM PDT
good work

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Doesn't scale to large numbers
Authored by: jfaughnan on Tue, May 12 2009 at 2:33PM PDT
This worked fine for small numbers of contacts. I tested using Outlook 2007 and a few hundred contacts and it failed with an error message.

---
--
John Faughnan
jfaughnan@spamcop.net
www.faughnan.com

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Doesn't scale to large numbers
Authored by: savage on Wed, May 13 2009 at 12:54AM PDT
to be fair i gave up on all these time consuming and unreliable methods.
I tried many way of moving full outlook profiles for me and clients.

I now use outlook2mac http://www.littlemachines.com/ and it has taken the pain out of the process.

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Doesn't scale to large numbers
Authored by: GibsonCRG on Sun, Aug 23 2009 at 8:00PM PDT
I ran into the same problem with Outlook 2007 when I tried selecting all the contacts and choosing to forward them as vCards; I was able to work around it by creating a new, empty mail message, then moving the message window to one side, then selecting all the contacts, and dragging them to the mail message. Voila - after some minutes churning, a message with all the vCards as attachments was created with no error message!

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Doesn't scale to large numbers
Authored by: GibsonCRG on Sun, Aug 23 2009 at 8:09PM PDT
Bah, I am a doofus. Or not enough of a Windows person. I was WRONG in that it does attach all the contacts to the message when you drag, but of course it does NOT attach them as vCards, but rather as Outlook items (NOT Apple Address Book friendly). Please ignore me as I back slowly out the door.....

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Moving Outlook 2003 contacts to Address Book
Authored by: SeptimusFry on Wed, Dec 23 2009 at 7:23AM PST
Excellent hint. Reading through the comments added, I would like to report that the hint works 100%, but it will fail if you accidentally include any Distribution Lists in the contacts to dump as vCards. I today 'converted' over 700 contacts in one email from PC to iMac. I used CtrlA to select them all then the Ctrl key to exclude the DL's.

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