Filemaker talking with Address Book

I'm looking to get a more powerful database program.
Now Contact works great with Address Book. It imports
and exports automatically. Filemaker 8 would be
better for me since it works well with an old
customized invoice template. Filemaker though doesn't
have the automatic sych ability that Now has. Is
there a way to get the info in Filemaker back into
Address Book?

Power Mac
G4 Mac OS X (10.4.3)

I don't have an answer (wish I did) but I have the exact same question. 🙂 I use Filemaker Pro 8 for various purposes, including contact management. I want to be able to export Filemaker contact info into Address Book so I can do mail merges using Pages 2.0, which has the ability to link to Address Book for that purpose.

You could do a relatively easy AppleScript to get the work done if you have some skills in that area. I know that is not necessarily the route you'd both want to take. However, do some searches on AppleScript sites, maybe someone has already done one. A good place to start is http://macscripter.net/ but there are others.

I'd offer to help you out with this, but I only have FMP7. If you really are stuck and are not in a hurry, we could perhaps work around this.

Good luck



G5 DP 1.8Mhz Mac OS X (10.4.3) 1Gb RAM 2x 149Gb HDs

G5 DP 1.8Mhz Mac OS X (10.4.3) 1Gb RAM 2x 149Gb HDs

You could do a relatively easy AppleScript to get the
work done if you have some skills in that area.

I'm not all that skilled but I'm willing to learn. A few years back, before iTunes started selling videos, someone taught me how to script downloading the videos they were showing but not selling (they've got smart since then and are now selling them :))

But if you could point me in a direction where I could learn how to Applescript this, I would appreciate it very much.

Thanks for your reply in any case...

Hi JohnnyAngel

I found this on a "Filemaker Addressbook" Google search (try it yourself, there are loads of hits) http://econtact.slade.de/en/fm2ab.php

Otherwise, you can start looking at some of these;
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/applescript/resources.html
http://macscripter.net/
http://www.latenightsw.com/scripting.html

Also worth looking into is that here are a bunch of free Automator actions on the FMP site. Perhaps, and I stress perhaps, there may be a way making a workflow that will work.

Bernard - thanks for the referrals. I will check them out.

But in the meantime, I found a somewhat complex way to get it done.

In Filemanker Pro 8, open the database, then, in the menu bar, go to file/export records. Then, in the resulting "export records to file" window's "type" drop-down, select "tab-separate text" then name and save the resulting file.

Then open Address Book and go to file/import/text file and select the file you just created. After that it may get a bit complicated matching field names but I did it. The I opened Pages and successfully ran a mail merge using the newly-stocked Address Book.

I'm sure all this can be scripted in order to save time, hence my appreciation for your leads. I will just have to read up on it.

Thanks again.

Harmel2 - see my solution in my reply to Bernard.

Hi. I am new on this on this forum, but as I spent quite much time in searching the good sync script or app to proceed this, i want to share my findings.

AB2FM: It seems very attractive, but the sister app, to proceed the otherway, FM2AB doesn't work. At the first step, while selecting GROUP, nothing happened. I wrote the author on Feb 25, but still no reply. If I get a positive feedback, that's the one I will buy

ADDRESS BOOK MANIPULATOR: is quite complicate and limited

(also see comments on macupdate http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15289)

VCard MANIPULATOR is well developped but for restricted home use only.

Looking forward to discovering any prof. solutions quickly
Luc

Pb G4 1.33ghz Mac OS X (10.4.5) professional use

Hi,
if you run Filemaker 5or 6 only, please see Address Exchange. Version FP7 expected.
http://www.minibuero.ch/adrexchange/index.html
good luck
Luc