Hi everyone, I am looking for help with importing all my old phone contacts (in xls/numbers form) into Address Book in Tiger, so that I could use the iSync to put everything onto my new phone (not an iphone, though, but a Nokia that works with iSync). I guess iphone people have probably plenty of experience of doing this, so I ask here as a non-iphone user. Please help! Thanks a lot in advance.
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How to import contacts from excel/numbers file to Address Book?
- Thread starter tonfisk
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Take a look at this...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=AddressBook/4.0/en/ad808.html
Basically trim the file so that it just contains a header row and the contacts in rows, and then you will save the XLS as a csv (text file) in Excel. Then use the importing feature in Address Book to import it. Take your time and make sure all data is identified correctly so you don't have to spend extensive time reformatting or fixing your contacts.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=AddressBook/4.0/en/ad808.html
Basically trim the file so that it just contains a header row and the contacts in rows, and then you will save the XLS as a csv (text file) in Excel. Then use the importing feature in Address Book to import it. Take your time and make sure all data is identified correctly so you don't have to spend extensive time reformatting or fixing your contacts.
Thank you mkrishnan, I am not sure if I understand correctly the way to sort out the excel sheet. I put data in the following form:
Name BusinessPhone HomePhone HomePhone2 MobilePhone
Nick 12345 12345 12345 12345
Cathy 1234 1234 1234 1234
And then I exported it into CSV file. Address Book did manage to import it, however it does not show individual information correctly in each card (actually it looks massy). Did I miss something there? Thank you again.
Sorry for the bad text editing.
Name BusinessPhone HomePhone HomePhone2 MobilePhone
Nick 12345 12345 12345 12345
Cathy 1234 1234 1234 1234
And then I exported it into CSV file. Address Book did manage to import it, however it does not show individual information correctly in each card (actually it looks massy). Did I miss something there? Thank you again.
Sorry for the bad text editing.
cool I finally got it right. I think in excel sheet I do not have to use comma. The trick is that I should choose title for each entry correctly when importing data from CSV into address book, in the left column of the popup window. Thank you guys!
CSV = "comma separated values" -- when you save in this format, Excel automatically puts all the commas in for you. There's also "tab delimited format," where there are tabs between them; it doesn't really matter which you use.
Like you said, the trick is taking your time doing all the title choosing, as discussed in the Apple note I linked, because this determines what gets imported as what (because Apple may call each field a different thing than you did).
Glad to hear you got it working. You'll love iSync. I've been very happily syncing my phones with the address book since the end of 2003. I'd never go back. Every time I buy a new phone, I plug it in, and bam, I have all my people in it.
CSV = "comma separated values" -- when you save in this format, Excel automatically puts all the commas in for you. There's also "tab delimited format," where there are tabs between them; it doesn't really matter which you use.
Like you said, the trick is taking your time doing all the title choosing, as discussed in the Apple note I linked, because this determines what gets imported as what (because Apple may call each field a different thing than you did).
Glad to hear you got it working. You'll love iSync. I've been very happily syncing my phones with the address book since the end of 2003. I'd never go back. Every time I buy a new phone, I plug it in, and bam, I have all my people in it.
That's right, it is a really convenient tool the iSync. I do enjoy using it!