One-time FM > Address Book

[mackerelhead]

We have a 4,000-record FM DB with our address book data. We'd like to do a one-time transfer into Apple Address Book. Anyone out there who knows vCard/xslt/Address Book etc. well enough to do this without much trouble?

[fmdevusa]

You can do this allot of ways - you might want to use gmail or yahoo as the first stop for the initial load using their proven import method, and then use sync services to bring to whatever local MAC Address Books (In address books preferences - see synchronize with yahoo/gmail and oh yeah mobileme (but that costs).

[Lee Smith]

There is a utility at Apple called; Export Address Book 1.5

I ran across this site, maybe it can do it too. Address Book Exporter.app

I just gave Address Book Exporter.app a little test, and I think it will do what you want. It's Freeware, buy the author will take a shareware fee if you feel so kind.

License

Address Book Exporter is a freeware — this means you can use it as long as you like, for free — and is provided as is, WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY. That said, it can't honestly do any harm on your computer. It just reads your Address Book database and never attempts to write to it.

You are welcome to contact me (David Martin) if you have any question, suggestion, or if you just want to write something. And though ABE is freeware, if you feel like donating a few bucks, you can use my PayPal account.

HTH

Lee

Edited February 12, 2010 by Guest

[LaurenKuhlman]

Just want to mention. I have used Address Book Exporter and it worked just fine. You may want to make a script so you only have to do the import field name matching once. I export 'using current field settings' the first row is field names.

If you ever run this export/import again, I made a self-join where the table occurrences are related on first name / last name. I loop through the records and if Count ( Other Table Occurrence::field ) > 1, I delete the previously imported record. This is assuming your address book is more accurate. If this doesn't make sense, just let me know.

Edited February 16, 2010 by Guest

[tv_kid]

I may be wrong, but I believe the poster wants to export from Filemaker to Address Book, and not the other way around. If that's the case, you could try the following custom function:

vCard

This will return text in the vCard format, which can be imported easily into Address Book. Using a looping script you can export all of your records to a folder then bring into Address Book. I have used this in the past and it works fine, if it is a little bit of effort to set up.

Hope this helps