Importing records into Address Book

I note the difficulties some have had importing records. I too am having problems. I'm trying to get my Filemaker databases into Address Book so that I can then move them to my iPod. Exporting from Filemaker is fine, and importing into Address Book appears to be. However on closer examination it isn't, as all the records have been imported but not all the fields in all the records. As the import isn't perfect, it's arguably useless.
Anyone else had this experience? Any suggestions as to where the problem lies? And has anyone found the best way to get Filemaker databases onto iPods?
Thanks.

If you open Address Book, click on Card menuitem and select Edit Template. This will show you what the current template is and what fields may be added to the template.
You can then edit the LDIF file when it's created to select only the desired export fields that will match the template.
I believe when you then import into Address Book you will have an opportunity to match up the corresponding fields. Been so long since I did this I don't remember.

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I have the answer to Importing VCards into Address book

Ok after reading all the forums etc and banging my head against the wall for a couple of hour I have found a two stage solution to Importing VCards from Outlook into Address book.
As I have 978 contacts in about 14 categories I had to find an efficient solution, firstly I downloaded a small program called "Outpod": Backup iPod to PC,copy songs from iPod to computer,iPod to iTunes whilst it is old and talks about iPod it works perfectly on my Outlook 2010 version.
It doesn't actually "install", just run the .exe file from anywhere after you extract it. In Outpod select "Contacts" if you have multiple profiles it will then prompt for which profile to use, expand your Contacts list, and then select "categories" on the top bar.
All contacts are now displayed in their correct category, select all of the contacts in the first category, right click, and select you want to export from a Category using Outpod, insert a thumbdrive on the PC, right click and select "Save selected items in one file", Outpod will ask you where you wish to save the file and gives you the opportunity to name the file. Just name the file the same name as the category you are exporting to, and repeat for all categories until you have them all on the USB stick.
Now to the Mac. Open Address Book on the Mac, create Groups (not "Smart Groups") to match all your categories. Now insert the thumb drive into the Mac, open it in the Finder until you can see all your files. with both windows open, highlight the Group in Address Book and then double click the corresponding file in the finder window. Shazam! all those contacts will appear in the correct group. repeat for all other Groups.
I find it astonishing that Apple just ignore issues like this, and "Last Import" not clearing it's cache for instance. So now I just have to figure out how to get a movie to auto play on a Keynote slide, another great product dissapointment, anyone?
Cheers
Tex260Z

Thank you thank you. UTF 16 did the trick. What I was trying to do was import/save addresses i found on whitepages.com directly to my address book. I can't seem to find an ideal way tht doesn't involve a few steps of cutting and pasting. anyone?

AppleScript and importing images into Address Book

Hi all:
I have a simple AppleScript that will create an Address Book entry. I want to import the picture as well, given a filename, but nothing I've tried will work. I get stuck on the fact that AB expects to be fed a TIFF picture, yet I can't figure out how to extract the actual picture data from the file.
My AppleScripting is terribly rusty, so any help would be welcome - no matter how detailed.
elderly G4 Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Figured it out -I ended up putting the picture file directly into ~/Library/Application Support/AddrressBook/Images and naming it with the record ID provided by Address Book.

Import vcf into Address Book loosing multiple mobile phone numbers

When I import vcf entries that hold more than one mobile phone number, all but the first number is lost. This behavior changed from address book version 4.1.2 (osx 10.5 leopard) to address book version 5.0.1 (snow leopard - 10.6.2).
You can try yourself:
create an entry in the address book that has multiple mobile phone numbers, export that entry as a vcf file, delete the entry in the address book and reimport the vcf file. All but the first mobile phone number is lost! It works correct in addressbook in leopard but does not anymore in the latest version of snow leopard. I even think the error just appeard after the last update to 10.6.2!
Apple, please fix this bug!
regard
Christof

Address Book 5.0.1 multiple field issues:
We have found the same thing. It seems to only be Address Book 5.0.1 which is affected. We are cautiously using our previous version 5.0 (from Snow Leopard 10.6.1) which seems not to be affected.
It is also a problem if you merge records. We have found that any fields which have matching labels will be deleted leaving only one. In some cases other fields which do not match label are also deleted. We have also experienced an issue with the preferences for the formatting of Phone Numbers in the preferences dialog no longer working correctly.
We have reported this to Apple RADAR bug reports. We have referenced this thread too.
In the meantime our advice is to:
Back up your Apple Address Book contacts and keep the backup safe.
carefully use Address Book v 5.0 from Snow Leopard 10.6.1 (cautiously at your own risk as there may be issues using a version that is not designed for 10.6.2 - back up your address book first). This version has always seemed pretty reliable for us.
If you continue to use v 5.0.1 do not merge any contacts. do not run find duplicates (just in case). do not import any contacts into the address book.
Edward Hirst
Equinox Features

Importing birthdays into address book

I am trying to import my birthdays from microsoft outlook into the contact information in address book. Can anyone tell me how to do this on a mass scale?

When I switched to Mac, I used a dandy little app called o2m to get everything from Outlook. Not perfect, but almost. Go to www.littlemachines.com/download.php

Unable to import vcards into address book including birthdays

I recently upgraded to Lion. (in meantime I did a complete fresh Lion installation twice)
The same problem occurs:
Before I installed Lion I exported all my address book data into vcard-Format.
Each vcard can be opened for example with "textedit" and everything is fine.
But when I try to import these vcards in the new Lion address book all data is imported
except the birthdays. I am still able to refresh the birthday data manually.
Moreover after installing Lion Server the birthday field is switched off. I am no even more able
to type in the birthday data manually.
Anyone an idea?

Hallo Henner!
Maybe it's similar to my problem. I use the CalenderServer from http://trac.calendarserver.org running on a Linux Server. "The Address Book Server which shipped as part of Snow Leopard Server" ... "has been added to the existing Calendar Server Project".
The CardDAV server converts, stores and outputs the birthdays in format YYYYMMDD. This leads to a behaviour of Lion's address book (6.0) similar to your description: if a add a birthday, address book sends this date to the server, the server stores the date in unhyphenated format, address book updates it's own data, could not handle the date format and does not display the birthday. But the birthday is still present on the server and the vCard will be synchronized with Snow Leopard's and iPhone's address book which are both capable to cope with the YYYYMMDD format.
Currently I parse all vCards server-side by a small script (cronjob), create a birthday calender and subscribe to this calendar. This works good enough to wait for a bug fix of Apple's address book instead of hacking CalendarServer.
Rolf

How to import attachment into Address Book "Notes" field

Is it possible to import an attachment into the Address Book "Notes" field? Jpg, PDF, pages doc, whatever...? Don't really care if the file is "visible" (IE if photo, can actually SEE photo)... a clickable icon would be fine.
Thanks
Ian

Hi and Welcome to the Forums!
I'm not aware of any direct connector provided by RIM for this purpose. They do supply an ASCII/CSV import capability...see this KB:
KB11194 How to import contacts from an CSV file to the BlackBerry device
You'd have to find out from AOL how to get your contacts exported to an ASCII or CSV file.
Good luck and let us know!
Occam's Razor nearly always applies when troubleshooting technology issues!
If anyone has been helpful to you, please show your appreciation by clicking the button inside of their post. Please click here and read, along with the threads to which it links, for helpful information to guide you as you proceed. I always recommend that you treat your BlackBerry like any other computing device, including using a regular backup schedule...click here for an article with instructions.
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Error when importing .csv into Address Book. Address,Street etc doesnt show

Can anyone help me?
I saved my excel contact list to either Tab Delimeted .txt or .csv file. Then when i import in Address book as Test file, it does not import the address. And when i click on the tabs to import, it keeps loading and hang.
Even if i dont import the address line, those underlined were not shown even though detected.
My columns are:
First / Last / Job Title / Company / Address / Street / City / _*Postal Code*_ / Country / State / Phone / Work / Phone Fax

Are you trying to import from within the AB application, menubar File > Import > VCards? If so, what happens if, in Finder, you just double-click on the VCF file?

Importing addresses in Word document into Address Book

I have a Word document that has all of my addresses in a label-like format.
How do I import this into Address Book? can I make some easy modifications so I do not have to retype the whole thing into Address Book.

Mail can import a tab delimited text file. Do a find and replace to change the spaces to Tabs. If you have a double-return between records, then you can search for that and replace it with a manual line break. Then, change the rest of the paragraphs to tabs so that each record is one line.
You can then change the manual line breaks back to paragraph marks.
You may have to ensure you have the same number of fields for each record by adding tabs to ones that don't have all the info of the rest.

Can someone help me import perfect csv spreadsheet into address book?

I have spent almost two years perfecting my excel spreadsheet with columns exactly matching the fields in address book, and saved as a CSV. When I try to import up comes a two-column list, fine up until column 8, where it suddenly starts saying "do not import" and "ignore" and "in use". I fiddle for hours but don't know what it means. Experiments lead to fields in the wrong places. I have read a whole correspondence about this, but solutions too complex for me.

Anything here help?
Importing contacts into Address Book
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=AddressBook/4.0/en/ad808.html

How do I import a word doc into address book

I have word doc with address labels, I want to import that into address book, how would I do that? If word can't do that I can also open it in Pages. Thank you.

The way to import datas in AddressBook is not what this forum is dedicated to.
Please go to
MacOS X 10.5 > Mail and AddressBook
or
MacOS X 10.4 > Mail and AddressBook
A quick search in AddressBook Help with the wonderful keyword "Import" teach us that AddressBook is able to import from:
vCard ;
format LDIF ;
TAB delimited file ;
CSV (comma-separated values)file.
So, it appears that the first thing to do would be to save your Word document as a TAB delimited file or as a CSV one.
Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE mardi 29 juillet 2008 17:57:29)

Import .txt (from Excel) into Address book not happening

I am attempting to import a .txt file (exported from an Excel file) containing 5000 contacts with email and phone details. In the Import dialogue I can map the columns to the Address Book properties. When I press OK the button stays blue (highlighted) for a few seconds but no import occurs. Not even the card being previewed.
What am I missing here? (Bit urgent too)

I had the same problem. I saved as tab-delimited in excel, closed it but upon import, address book would hang (spinning wheel or no response). So, I reopened the .txt file in Numbers instead, got rid of any strange lines, saved again as .txt. Then, I imported it into Address book and it was fine.
To see whether it had to do with Numbers or Excel, I reopened the .txt file in Excel also, did the editing out of strange lines/cells again, and imported into address book again without problems.
Seems like a really dumb hack, but it worked for me. I had 62 entries (address book always stalled at 5).

Can't complete .dsv file import into Address Book

Hi folks, this is driving me insane (and has been for months off and on!)
I exported all my contacts from Entourage and want to import them into Address Book.
The file is a .dsv file. I select File>import>text file and locate the file.
I then check each field to make sure the information on the right corresponds to the field title on the left.
I can click the forward arrow at the bottom and I can click the OK button - but it doesn't seem to do ANYTHING!
I can see the cards individually as I click the right arrow button. I've even tried clicking through and hitting OK on each one individually but when I get to my final contact, nothing happens.
I have wasted so many hours on this. Can someone please help me complete the import of this CSV file (Help is worse than useless on this subject!)
Many many thanks!
David.

Thanks for the quick reply Mort but unfortunately I no longer have the Entourage data (just the exported DSV file) and I had already read and tried the other thread.
It all seems to work fine but when I've finished there's no option to complete or get rid of the box with the field information in it.
The OK button is clickable (ie not greyed out) but doesn't seem to do anything.
I really don't want to have to manually enter this data but with the time it's taking me to resolve the import problem I'd be quicker re-typing everything!
Any other suggestions/fixes anyone?
Thanks
David.

Problem importing CSV or tab-delimited file into Address Book

I am trying to import a text file (tab delimited) or csv file into address book. The files are created in Excel and consist 8 columns with address info (first name, last name, street, city etc). For the sake of simplicity, the file only contains 2 records - so all in all 3 rows with data where the first row contains the headers as described above.
I am perfectly able to import the fields first name, last name using Address Book's text import feature. However, as soon as I try to map Address Book's address field (Home, work or other) to my text file's headers, the import wizard stops responding. I can still scroll through the records with the left and right error, but the record count is screwed up ("-3 of 2") and clicking the OK button doesn't result in anything.
So I am able to import the names but not the addresses - so I better rename the Address Book to Name Book
Any clue of what's going wrong?

I've been wrestling with the exact same problem. I have come to a solution, though serendipitously. The address variables belong to a group say address Office.
1 - I creted a column with address Office which clued in AddressBook the the existence of the data for +address Other+ (and it assigned the columns ot the proper data)
2 - address book does have an entry of address with all group elements of same colour, normally. I reassign address other to address office
3 - I also assign address office (in right-hand column) to address office.
At this point I have two groups of address office
4 - I indicate to the second group 'do not import'
5 - Then hit OK
It seems that this loop is necessary to instantiate the proper group name to the group of variables. Why? who knows. Bad UI? Clearly. Apple engineers should've thought about it before? no kidding...

Importing into Address Book with Custom Fields from a Text File.

Hello
I'm a teacher and like to create contacts for my students. The information that I want in each contact besides their name, email address and phone number are their
student id's, semester enrolled, class number and class title. For these four fields I create a "Custom" field with the appropriate names: "ID", "Term", "Course" and "Class" respectively.
All this information I can download from the school's server in a CSV file.
To import the information into Address Book, I choose "File -> Import -> Text File" and then select the CSV file that I downloaded. The import utility opens up correctly showing all the fields I would like to import, however, many of the fields are marked as "Do not import." When I click on that term to select my Custom fields, they do not show up. Is this a bug or "feature" of the Address Book? It seems to me that if you are allowed to create useful custom fields, you should be able to import data into them as well.
If I'm just ignorant of how to do this, I would appreciate some help. If there is no way to currently do this efficiently, it would be nice to have this feature added to the Address book in the near future.
Thanks for your consideration,
Gary

Thanks for posting your question and the reply from rojok...
I'm a teacher as well - in Entourage I was able to just copy a column of email addresses (say from an Excel spreadsheet, downloaded from the school's server here at U MD) and then create a group and simply paste that list into the group. Address Book makes you do the extra step of importing all the addresses first. (Note: Your last imported list of contacts in this manner shows up as "Last Import" in the groups lists column to the left in Address Book - so to add contacts to a Group there, you select that Last Import group, click once in that list column one contact, say, then select all of the list - then Command + A, for select all - then drag them all to your group you've made - i.e. "MySpringClassList"). This is NOT very intuitive I might add and incredibly cumbersome of a process.
To get around the customizable info I needed to import... I just chose options that I don't regularly use for those things I needed to import - i.e. student I.D., these I placed under "ICQ Other" - that way they're imported at least.
Good luck,
Andrew

Importing records into Address Book

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