From Outlook to Apple Address Book

I’ve been trying to consolidate the address books on my various machines (Windows PC running Outlook 2002, Apple Powerbook running Address Book, and Sony Clie UX50). Being the nice program that it is, Outlook 2002 will let you export contacts as vCards. Great! Address Book will read those. However, Microsoft don’t want to be seen making it easy for people to migrate away from their programs so they only let you export to vCards one contact at a time. I could learn VBA and write a script to export all my contacts, but, frankly, I have better things to do with my time. Fortunately, someone else has encountered much the same problem, though they were creating vCards for import into Evolution So, if you want to export multiple vCards, for importing into another contact manager, I can recommend Outport which does exactly that (and also handles all of the other data stored in Outlook).

I’ve now consolidated everything onto the Mac, and using Missing Sync I can sync that with my Clie, and my Sony Ericsson T68i.
If only I hadn’t somehow managed to delete all the birthday dates from Outlook’s calendar…