Bulk change Address Book contacts?

you can do it with apple script but Automator has no ready made actions for that. what kind of a bulk change do you need?

you mean the phone numbers? as I said, it's pretty easy with apple script. we could help you with that if you explain what exactly needs to be done.

sorry, i was being daft. I checked and it seems that there is no separate prefix field in the address book even though there is a suffix field (but that will show up after the name). i find that decidedly odd but there it is. therefore one would stick a prefix by changing the first name. this is not elegant but i don't see what else is there to do.

the following apple script will add "Mr. " to the first name of every selected person. paste it into Script editor and save it as an application or just run it from script editor.

<pre style="
font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;
font-size: 10px;
margin: 0px;
padding: 5px;
border: 1px solid #000000;
width: 720px;
color: #000000;
background-color: #ADD8E6;
overflow: auto;"
title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor">
tell application "Address Book"
set mlist to selection
repeat with cper in mlist
set fname to first name of cper
set first name of cper to "Mr." & fname
end repeat
end tell
</pre>

The <title> field is what you want to change. Here is V.K.'s modified script:

tell application "Address Book"
 set mlist to selection
 repeat with cper in mlist
 set title of cper to "Mr." 
 end repeat
end tell

thanks Barney, don't know how I missed it. it was right next to suffix in the dictionary.

Ok, here is a better script. It asks for the prefix you want to apply.:

tell application "Address Book"
 set myTitle to text returned of (display dialog "Enter a prefix to apply:" default answer "Mr." buttons {"Cancel", "Apply"})
 set mlist to selection
 repeat with cper in mlist
 set title of cper to myTitle
 end repeat
 save addressbook
end tell

Also, if you have trouble when you cmd+click to select multiple items and get half way through the list and mess up the selection, you can make a group, move the contacts into the group, select all in the group, and then run the script.

Yes, but it's called prefix in the Address Book app, but title in the Applescript dictionary.

Sorry for the random addition to this thread. I want to remove the "(0)" prefix on phone numbers as when it syncs across to my iPhone (via Spanning Sync through Google Apps) it adds the zero.

I then have to manually edit each number before I can dial out. And I have lots of contacts.

Any suggestions? I am a relative novice when it comes to Script so please be gentle with me.

Many thanks, Paul

Barney or anyone else that can help,

Is there any way to rework that script to make it change words in the Address Book Note field? I want to change the spelling of a bunch of different words on a bunch of cards so I want to make a script that will change one spelling to another spelling and then do it again with a different pair of words.

Any help you can give me would be much appreciated because I am getting very tired of making changes manually on each card as I have more than 5,000 cards in my Address Book database.

Thanks again,
..michael..