Moving Outlook 2007 Contacts to Mac OS X Address Book

In the never ending fun of existing in the dual platform world - I have encountered many problems. Two of my biggest headaches as an educator is coordinating and syncing all my contacts, emails, and other stuff between all my PC and macs and iPhone.

The newest crisis is handling a program that should do all this easily - Mobile Me. I subscribe to this service for the many advantages it offers. The best one is to have a "cloud" where I can store important files and access them anywhere via the internet. The problem is that Mobile Me does not work well on the PC. I use my PC as my base computer and do most of my work there and update all my contacts in Outlook 2007. The real hurt is that Mobile Me does not sync with the PC properly. The contacts in Mobile Me will not change or take updates from the PC (replace) even though I change the settings to do this.

The solution - I deleted all the contacts on my MacBook's Address book and copied my contacts from my PC (outlined below with updates for Outlook 2007 in Windows7) to the MacBook and then I synced the MacBook to Mobile Me and the data was finally replaced. Now all my computers are in sync. Of course now I will have keep syncing this way but until they fix Mobile Me that's all one can do.

See the steps below I took to move my contacts from Outlook 2007 to the Mac Address Book:

1. Open Outlook Contacts list.
2. Select all your contacts. This may be easiest in “Address Cards” view.
3. In the “Action” menu, select “Send Full contact”, and "In Internet Format (vCard)".
4. Wait (really.........)a moment ..........while Outlook creates a new email with all of your contacts attached to it as vCards.
5. Send this email to yourself (be careful not to send it to anyone else, obviously).
6. Upon receipt of this email, save all the attachments to a location your mac can access (create a folder to put them all in), then import them into your Mac OS X Address Book and you're done.
   

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 for misplaced data is insane.

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