Export Contacts & Address Book to Excel, Numbers, CSV, SQLite Your Apple Mac's built-in Contacts app will only export contacts as VCards. Common spreadsheets or databases can't handle VCards so there's no easy way to get your contacts into Excel, Numbers or SQLite.



Softmatic Exporter Pro for Mac, or ABE for short, will export your contacts to all common formats: CSV, TSV, Excel (MS Excel from 2007, Apple Numbers), SQLite. Softmatic ABE Download Mac Address Book Export Features Highly configurable, very fast, easy to use - process even large Address Books with thousands of contacts in seconds. The created files can be used cross-platform - on Macs, Windows, Linux etc.



Simply drag contacts from the Address Book into the app, select the fields to export, and pick an output format from the list. Click Export... and off you go. Can't be easier! Export individual contacts or the whole Address Book

Simply drag contacts from the Address Book into the app

Use selected fields only, e.g. only Home entries of a contact

Sort contacts and fields

Freely arrange output columns and specify column names

Save column settings as template for reuse

Integrated preview in tabular form

Fully Unicode compatible, works with all alphabets and languages

Export Address Book to CSV (comma or TAB separated) for import in Word, Outlook and similar applications

Export Address Book to native Excel XLSX files, also usable in Apple Numbers, Open Office

Export Address Book to SQLite

Available in English, German - Mac OS X 10.7 or higher Mac Address Book Export Screenshot

Click for full size Softmatic ABE Download Softmatic ABE Manual & Workflow Table of contents Launch

Importing contacts

Setting fields

Exporting contacts to Excel, Apple Numbers, OpenOffice

Exporting contacts to CSV, TSV, TXT

Exporting contacts to SQLite

Saving and loading presets Launch The app window at launch:







We haven't imported any contacts yet, so most settings are disabled at the moment. Importing contacts Contacts are imported by dragging them from the Contacts app into the table on the left side of the app window. Here we've selected a bunch of (fictional) contacts:







The contacts are imported and sorted. A little icon is put next to the contact to indicate if it's a person or a company. In this example all contacts are persons. Using the current set of fields as listed in the right half of the app window, the import also populates the Preview table:







Tip: To import all contacts use the Add... popup under the contacts list and select All contacts.



You delete contacts from the table by selecting them in the list (Shift-click and Cmd-click for multiple selection) and clicking the '-' button. To delete all contacts, click Clear all.



Note: This will not remove the original contacts from your Contacts app. As a sandboxed app Softmatic ABE can not modify your contacts. Setting fields Softmatic ABE comes with three presets, called Minimum, Standard, and All. A preset is a collection of fields, e.g. City, a label, e.g. Home, and an associated column header, e.g. Work Home. You already know the concept of fields and labels from the Contacts application. The column header determines how the column in the exported file is named.



The screenshots above show the preset Minimum which is loaded by default. It contains the most common fields for personal contacts, like name, home adress etc. If you look at the Preview window, you'll notice that it uses the column headers from the preset. To edit a column header, select it and hit <Enter>. End editing by hitting <Enter> again and notice how the header in the Preview changes.



You can anytime add new fields by clicking the Add... popup under the fields list. The menu lists all fields that the Contacts app makes available:







Here we add the field Prefix (like Mr., Dr., Prof. etc.) to the preset. By default the field is appended at the end, but you can simply drag it to another position:







Note that the preview is updated to reflect the field we've added. Exporting Mac contacts to Excel, Apple Numbers, OpenOffice Once you are happy with your settings it's time to export the contacts data. To export to Microsoft Excel or Apple Numbers, select XLSX from the Export as... popup. Then click Export... You will be prompted for a file name, then the data is exported.



The created file can be directly opened in Excel, OpenOffice Calc or Numbers:



Exporting Mac contacts to CSV, TSV, TXT Once you are happy with your settings it's time to export the contacts data. To export to CSV (Comma-separated) or TSV (TAB-separated), select CSV or TSV from the Export as... popup. This will open the export options dialog:







The default options are suitable for most situations. If you plan to use the data on a Mac, leave the settings as is. If you plan to export to Windows, it might be necessary to change the setting for Encoding. On very old Windows systems, ISO Latin-1 is the preferred encoding. Also, select the proper line ending according to the target system.



Then click Export... You will be prompted for a file name, then the data is exported. Exporting Mac contacts to SQLite Once you are happy with your settings it's time to export the contacts data. To export to SQLite, select SQLite from the Export as... popup. Then click Export... You will be prompted for a file name, then the data is exported.



The created file with the extension sqlite can be opened with common SQLite aware apps, like SQLite Professional.



The schema:







The data:



Saving and loading presets As described above, Softmatic ABE comes with three predefined presets. Very often you will have the need to add or remove fields, change the field order or rename a column header. Once you've made your changes, you can store the modified preset for later use.



To save a preset, click the Presets... popup and select Save preset...



To load a preset, click the Presets... popup and select Load preset...



Presets for Softmatic ABE have the .fld file extension. More Mac utilities

Softmatic QR Perfect



Fully featured QR barcode generator with logo embedding. Mac QR code generator.



See all.