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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Saturday, April 23, 2005

Tiger Feature of the Day: Text-based Contacts Import in Address Book

In previous versions of Mac OS X, the Address Book application could only import vCards and LDIF (Lightweight Directory Interchange Format) files, severely limiting compatibility with third party email applications and giving rise to a cottage industry of custom contacts importers. In Tiger, Address Book has been updated to version 4.0 (from 3.1 in Panther). Among the new features is a new contacts importer that can import contacts from text files (in addition to vCards and LDIF files). These text files can be in tab-delimited or CSV (comma-separated values) format.

To test this feature, I exported my Windows-based Microsoft Outlook contacts list to various tab-delimited and CSV formats and then attempted to import them into Address Book in Tiger. You import text files by selecting the File menu, then Import, and then Text file. In the resulting File Open dialog, navigate to the location where you've stored the text file and select it, then click open.

I tested the four different text file formats and received the following results:

CSV (DOS format) - Text file import failure.
CSV (Windows format) - Text file import failure.
Tab-delimited (DOS format) - Text file import failure.
Tab-delimited (Windows format) - Text file import failure.

Convinced that the problem was Outlook and not Address Book, I then imported my Outlook contacts into Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows, and then exported them again to CSV and tab-delimited text files. I also exported the Thunderbird contacts as an LDIF file for testing purposes. I received the following results:

CSV - Brought up the Text File Import dialog, but had no idea how to handle the various fields.
Tab-delimited - Brought up the Text File Import dialog, but had no idea how to handle the various fields.
LDIF - Worked fine. Address Book noted that it was importing 81 new cards and all of the contact fields appeared to map correctly.

I've struggled with contacts importing on Mac OS X before, as evidenced by this article, and had hoped that the addition of text importing in Address Book in Tiger would make things easier. But that doesn't appear to be the case: I still need to use a third party tool to exchange data between Outlook and Tiger's Address Book. That's too bad, and it will make life a bit difficult for anyone that uses both Windows and the Mac.

[ Posted at 12:08 PM | Permalink ]