Help needed: Address Book entries --> Entourage address book

[jasondv]

I've practically stopped using Entourage because I sync my Palm to iCal and Address Book. I use Entourage only for official mail, because I can't get Apple's Mail to work with our MS Exchange server in the university (it has to do with the security configuration of our server; I can't retreive any of my POP-based accounts through Apple Mail).

My problem is that since I stopped syncing with Entourage several months ago, my address book in Entourage is hopelessly out of date, and only Apple's Address book is updated. I want to overwrite the Entourage address book with my Apple Address Book entries. I see that I can create a single vCard with all 700+ entries from Address Book, but I can't find a way to bring them into Entourage. I tried following the instructions in Entourage Help (drag the vCard into the address book list) but it doesn't work. I don't want to have to drag the vCards one by one to Entourage.

Help! Can anyone provide a tip or suggestion or point me to the right web site? Thanks!

[gonz]

Originally posted by jasondv
I don't want to have to drag the vCards one by one to Entourage.

It doesn't have to be one by one -- I believe that you can drag multiple vCards to Entourage's Address Book window. If all 700 don't work in one go, try exporting in batches of a hundred or so.

Here's a TechTV article on the subject, for your reference. Good luck!

[Edited on 5-17-2004 by gonz]

[jasondv]

Originally posted by gonz
I believe that you can drag multiple vCards to Entourage's Address Book window. If all 700 don't work in one go, try exporting in batches of a hundred or so.

Here's a TechTV article on the subject, for your reference. Good luck!

Thanks for the tip, gonz. Dragging a vCard with all 700+ entries doesn't work; sadly, neither does doing it one by one! Can't figure out why, and nothing on the Mactopia support site gives me a lead. Sigh. You'd think that MS would be more than happy to see a customer use Entourage rather than Apple's Address Book and provide some tips on how to do the migration properly.

I'll check out the TechTV tip.

[jasondv]

Ok, I solved my problem, thanks to gonz's TechTV pointer. That article led me to Address Book Exporter by David Martin, which let me export the Address Book entries as a text file, which I then imported into Entourage. Cool app -- free, and lets you export using various templates, including Entourage. About the only drawback is that I lost all the categories, but it's not a big deal since I use Address Book to manage my entries.