Exporter for Contacts (formerly 'Export Address Book') is a popular and powerful Mac app for exporting contact information from your Mac's Contacts app (Address Book) to XLSX for Excel spreadsheet, CSV and other formats. The app lets you save any export setup for later re.
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Contacts User Guide
You can import contacts from other computers or apps as files in a variety of file types—for example, vCard (with the extension .vcf), archive (.abbu), LDAP Data Interchange Format (.ldif), or a tab-delimited or comma-separated value (.csv) text file.
Import from a vCard file (.vcf)
Do any of the following:
- Double-click the vCard file.
- In the Contacts app on your Mac, drag the vCard file to the sidebar or the list of contacts in the Contacts window.
- In Contacts, choose File > Import, then select the vCard file.
Import from an archive file (.abbu)
Important: Importing an archive file replaces your current contact information.
- In the Contacts app on your Mac, choose File > Import.
- Select the archive file, then click Open.
Import from other file types
Note: Before you import a tab-delimited or CSV file, use a text editor (such as TextEdit) to confirm the file is formatted correctly:
- Remove any line breaks within a contact’s information.
- Make sure all addresses have the same number of fields. Add empty fields as needed.
- Make sure fields are separated by a tab (in a tab-delimited file) or a comma (in a CSV file), instead of another character. Don’t include spaces before or after the tabs or commas.
- In the Contacts app on your Mac, choose File > Import, select the file, change the encoding if necessary, then click Open.
- If you’re importing a text file, review the field labels.
- If the first card contains headers, make sure the headers are correctly labeled or marked “Do not import.” Any changes you make to this card are made to all cards in the file. To not import the headers card, select “Ignore first card.”
- To change a label, click the arrows next to the label and choose a new label. If you don’t want to import a field, choose “Do not import.”
When you import contacts from an Exchange account, information that isn’t supported is added to the Note field. Custom fields aren’t imported.
During the import, Contacts indicates if it found duplicates of existing cards, so you can review and resolve them.
See alsoIf you can’t import a vCard into Contacts on MacMerge contact cards in Contacts on MacCreate groups of contacts in Contacts on MacAdd contacts from iCloud, Google, and more to Contacts on Mac
Your contacts are just phone numbers and addresses; they're business connections, loved ones, and each contact's card likely contains sensitive information and important stuff that you don't want to lose. You likely have contacts on your iPhone or iPad, and maybe you even use Messages and FaceTime on your Mac. If that's the case, back up your contacts on your Mac to make sure that no one goes missing.
How to manually back up contacts on your Mac
Just like your iPhone or iPad, you have a Contacts app on your Mac, and you can manually back up all of your contacts right in the app.
Export them
- Launch the Contacts app on your Mac.
- Click on File in the menu bar at the top of the screen.
- Click Export.
- Click on Contacts Archive.
- Name the save file, choose where you'd like to save, and click Save.Source: iMore
From here, you can do whatever you want with the saved file. Upload it to Dropbox, Google Drive, or save it on a physical backup.
Drag them to your desktop
Sometimes, exporting might not work 100%. Just one of those weird things. Even if it does, you're safest backing up your contacts another way too. (Thanks to commenter Gary Dauphin for the suggestion.)
- Launch the Contacts app on your Mac.
- Click All Contacts on the left.
- Click a contact.
- Press command-A on your keyboard. This will select all of your contacts.
- Click and drag your contacts to your desktop.Source: iMore
A .vcf file will be created, and you can add that to your cloud storage or physical backup or however you'd like to store it. You can also drag and drop individual contact cards if you don't want to back up all of them.
How to export your contacts to your Mac from iCloud
Using iCloud on the web, you can export your iPhone or iPad contacts straight to your Mac and then do whatever you'd like with them.
- Go to iCloud.com in your favorite browser.
- Sign in.
- Click Contacts.
- Click a contact.
- Press command-A on your keyboard. This will select all contacts.
- Click the gear icon in the bottom left of the window.
- Click Export vCard.Source: iMore
The file will download to your downloads folder on your Mac.
vCard vs. Contacts Archive
In February 2016, MacStories did a great job of explaining the differences between saving contacts as a vCard or archive and how the choice you select could affect a future import. The main points are worth repeating here since the execution remains the same even as OS X became macOS later that year.
The Export vCard choice only includes the selected contacts from the Contacts.app, while selecting Contacts Archive would include an export of all of your contacts. Moving forward, the former, when imported, will allow you to merge information with an existing contact. The latter, however, will replace your entire contacts .abbu database.
If you try to open an '.abbu' package in the OS X Contacts app, it will ask you if you want to replace your current contacts database with contents of '.abbu'. Let me repeat that for clarity: when importing a dot-abbu package, there is no option to merge with your existing data.
Questions?
Let us know in the comments below.
Backing up: The ultimate guide
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