The Automator tip of the week walks you through one way to extract the contact information from Address book and put it into a format that you can upload to Gmail.

Gmail accepts csv files for importing contacts. Unfortunately Address Book does not export directly to csv. Why it doesn’t is a puzzle in it self, but thankfully we can get the same results through Automator with the use of some Microsoft Office actions.

To create a csv file Automator of your contacts in Address Book add the following actions to a workflow:

1. Find People in Address Book, Set Whose to Name, is not equal to, and then use * in the input field - This tells automator to look through all the names in your address book and return everyone that doesn’t have a * in their name.
2. Get Contact Information, Export Format: Spreadsheet (tabs) - This gathers all the information about each contact and puts it into a standard format we can work with.
3. New Text File - I named it contacts.txt and saved it to my desktop - This will write the information from address book to a text file
4. Import Text Files to Excel Workbook - Select New Workbook and mark the delimiters as Tab
5. Save Excel Workbooks - Save Workbooks as contacts, on the desktop and select CSV(Comma Delimited) as the format

Import Address Book CSV File to Gmail

If everything was constructed correctly you should be able to run the workflow and 2 files will be written to your desktop. From here we can import our contacts.csv file into Gmail.

To import your contacts.csv to gmail:

1. Login to Gmail
2. Click Contacts
3. Click Import
4. Choose your contacts.csv file and click Import
5. Follow the final instructions from Gmail and verify your contacts imported correctly

Now that we’ve showed how to complete this process with Automator, there is also an application - A to G that was built do extract Address Book Contacts and place them in a CSV file.

Importing Contacts from Gmail into Address Book is a bit easier.

I know that one of the frustrating things about switching from one computer to another is the process of moving things like your address book may gets lost in the shuffle. Moving from a PC to a Mac could complicate the issue even further. For me this was a major reason why I went to web based email as I knew that I could keep my contacts forever and never have to worry about moving them. But despite the ease of web based email, its just not as powerful as system based email applications. Thankfully to Google and Apple I can now have the best of both worlds!

QUICK AND EASY EXPORT

While in the past there have been a number of methods to get your Gmail contacts into your Mac Address Book, most required a third party application and for some reason something always complicated the process. Thanks to the ever increasing friendship between Apple and Google it seems that with the latest updates to Gmail, exporting contacts in to an Address Book Format is quick and easy.

After logging into a Gmail account navigate to your contact list. From there you can export all your contacts or create a contact group that includes the addresses you want included into your Address Book on your Mac. After creating a group simply click export and then select the group from the export drop down menu. Be sure to pick vCard format as the export format and save the download to your desktop.

IMPORT IN TWO EASY CLICKS

Open Address Book and select File >> Import >> vCards. Select the downloaded .vcf file and confirm the import and your Gmail/Google contacts will now be included in your Address Book and accessible from all your other Mac Applications. You can repeat the process if you update your Gmail contacts often. Address Book will only import the new contacts and/or update edited information.

The shared contact list and the new IMAP feature of Gmail makes it a great tool to use with Mail on your computer and on your iPod/iPhone.

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