Have you ever wanted to build a Word or Excel file of some or all of the people in your Mac address book? A free tool let’s you do this easily. The original tool I found stopped working around the middle of 2019, but I found a very similar replacement. I provide instructions below.
[Update February 2020 I found some other apps that claim to give you ways to convert your AddressBook data to a .csv file. I haven’t tested them yet, but here are links to these products:
AB2CSV and an article from Lifewire about how to use AB2CSV.
Cisdem’s ContactMate (free or $40) and Cisdem’s article about how to use their own product.
An apparently free online converter, Aconvert.]
Here are instructions for creating an Excel file of all of the people in your Contacts applications. (Note: On older versions of OS X, the Contacts application was named Address Book. These instructions work the same if your Mac has the Address Book application.)
- Open the Contacts application on your Mac
- Click on one contact to select it, then go to the Edit menu and choose Select All. (If you only want some contacts in your Excel file then only select a subset of your contacts.)
- Click on the File menu and choose Export and then Export vCard.
- Save the vCard file on the Desktop or some other convenient location.
- Go to the following web site to convert your vCard file to a CSV file: https://tribulant.com/vcard-csv/
- CSV stands for Comma Separated Values
- Use the image below as a guide as you follow the next steps
- Click the Choose File button to select your vCard file.
- Set Format to CSV and choose Tab (CSV stands for comma separated values, for what it’s worth even though we are using Tab characters, not commas to separate data in our CSV file.)
- Click the Convert button. The web site will create a CSV file which’ll automatically be downloaded to your Mac.
- Open Excel, click on the File menu, select Import and choose the CSV file that was just downloaded to your Mac. You’ll be shown a preview of the data. Look it over. If it looks good, then click the Finish button.
Voilà you have an Excel file full of all contact data.