Importing CSV viles into OSX

October 14, 2004 4:41 PM

I have several hundred contacts with all sorts of information in my old OS9 outlook, which I must keep using for awhile due to our antiquated network. However, I was able to export my contacts as a "csv" file which seems to be some sort of excel spreadsheet. How do I import it into my OSX address book?
posted by luriete to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Sounds like you need something like this. (result of a quick google; i dont personally vouch for it)

A CSV file is just a text, comma-delimited file. You can open it with notepad (go ahead). Its a simple universal standard but many people think its an Excel file because Excel usually swallows it up in its file associations.
posted by vacapinta at 4:49 PM on October 14, 2004

I've used Address Book Importer, as linked to by Vacapinta. There's also an exporter out there, and have used that as well. There's even a widget that takes birthdays from Address Book and posts them to iCal (did you know you can put birthdays in there? You can). They all pretty much work as advertised, although you're inevitably dependent on how fastidious you were when entering the data originally.

I think contact groups will not carry through; you've got some time ahead cleaning up stuff like that.
posted by adamrice at 5:05 PM on October 14, 2004

There are also a family of scripts that come with your OS X distro. Do a search in OS X for "Address Book Scripts," and start poking around.
posted by mwhybark at 5:18 PM on October 14, 2004

Errr.... am I the only one here who has a script menu in Address Book which has 'Import from outlook' in it? This is off a recently clean install of Panther.
posted by nathan_teske at 5:28 PM on October 14, 2004

nathan_teske, I have that too.

On a side note, is there a way to export Hotmail contacts? I'd like to get them into my OS X Mail app / Address Book. Thanks!
posted by fionab at 7:24 PM on October 14, 2004

Huh, I don't have that. I am on 10.3.5. Weird. I have one for import from outlook EXPRESS, but not outlook. that one just self-destructs.
posted by luriete at 11:16 AM on October 15, 2004

Mind you, there are tools out there specifically for pulling off keycaps. Could make a job like this go a lot faster.
posted by adamrice at 1:24 PM on October 15, 2004