To be sure, one can use Entourage (part of the MS Office suite), but I do not like Entourage for my mail mainly because of backup concerns, its integration with my phone, and mail merge doesn't work all that great with the interface anyhow.
Effective mail merge for me means exporting a batch of contacts to an Excel file.
To do this with Address Book contacts, one builds out a group, export the group's vCard and then find a third party vCard to CSV conversion tool. Tools such as A-to-G (Address Book to Gmail) and Address Book to CSV Exporter do not work, despite their names, because their CSV format is designed for Gmail imports, and not for an Excel based mail merge.
What works better is this online vCard to LDIF/CSV Converter. It is by no means perfect, and you will have to manually import the created CSV file into Excel, as the automatic import creates a lot of errors.
But going through this multi-step tango is still quicker than retyping data in Excel. Someone should figure out an easier way to skin this cat, but for now this works.
subscribe to feed
6 comments:
This site allows you to upload a zip file of vcards and they come back as a single csv file
http://inter-help.com/toolbox/vcardtocsv
Maybe that will help...
On the Apple website, there is a utility that exports address book contacts to csv format:
the link did not show up so i'll take out the html tags:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/internet_utilities/addressbooktocsvexporter.html
Hi, thank you for sharing this great info. Was just browsing through the net in my office and happened upon your blog. It is really very well written and quit comprehensive in explaining with a very simple language.
It's amazing and yummy to see your blog. I just see your blog to be useful for me. I have a blog about your topic and advice me to get more ideas to improve my blogs. Thanks sharing.
I found a good trick: Import your Vcard OR CSV to a gmail account. Then, export from gmail into the desired format. Works like a CHARM.
Post a Comment