Export specific groups of contacts

Question

Export specific groups of contacts

I am the volunteer coordinator for a middle school with 1500 students. We are collecting email addresses for all potential volunteers and right now I have about 300 contacts entered (and another 300 forms still sitting on my desk). The contacts are divided into groups according to the committee(s) people want to join.

I need to export the addresses to send them to the committee chairs, but I have 2 concerns:

1. How do I send each committee chair only the addresses that pertain to his/her committee? In other words, can I export 1 group at a time? I don't want to send my whole address book to every committee, because then they won't know who has volunteered to work with them (plus there are a lot of non-school related contacts in my address book as well).

2. Is it better to use .csv or .txt files? I don't mind doing a little extra work if it will make it easier for the people receiving the addresses to import them into their email programs. Most of them use Windows, and several of them use AOL.

Thanks in advance for your help!

iMac G5, 14" iBook Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Posted on Aug 25, 2006 11:43 AM

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Answer 1

Aug 25, 2006 12:44 PM in response to twirlingelephants

Exporting Groups from AddressBook is not a problem... Select the Group and choose File>Export Group vCard

That should also answer your second question... While AddressBook can import .csv and .txt files, I don't think there is a way to change the export setting. vCard is a standard format so most email and address clients shouldn't have a problem with it.

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Answer 2

Aug 25, 2006 12:50 PM in response to twirlingelephants

You can export individual groups. Open the group and hightlight the first listing. Press Command-A to select all (of the individual names). Now when you choose Export, only the highlighted names will be used.

My Address Book only has the option to export as vCards. If you have another option, .cvs should work without any problems. Most mail/address book programs recognize the format.

Jim

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Answer 3

Aug 25, 2006 12:52 PM in response to twirlingelephants

Make a group for each committee, and drag the contact details for a volunteer into one or more groups. You can see what groups a contact is in by selecting the contact and holding down the Alt key; groups will be highlighted.

For exporting, select the group and use File/Export Group vCard - but the resulting file will be a text file in vCard layout. It SHOULD be importable by non-Apple users, but if not you will need to find one of the various AB export/import utilities, but I have no specific details.

AK

(For a twirling elephant, see http://w3.itcarlow.ie/elephant.gif)

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Answer 4

Aug 25, 2006 6:06 PM in response to twirlingelephants

Thanks for your input. I have the contacts assigned to the groups they have volunteered for, and I know that I can export the addresses using vcards, either individually or as a group. The problem is that the other people can't import them, so I need to use a different format. I've tried some of the programs mentioned on this forum, such as Export Address Book and AddressBook2CSV Exporter, but Export Address Book won't let me change the column names so that they will work for AOL and Address Book2CSV won't let me export selected names only. So I still need help.

Thanks also for the tip about using the Alt key to see all the groups a contact is in. Didn't know about that one. And I loved the twirling elephant!

iMac G5, 14" iBook Mac OS X (10.4.7)

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Answer 5

Aug 25, 2006 8:31 PM in response to twirlingelephants

I just checked AOL's support site and they claim to support vCards... not sure why the people you're sending them to couldn't import.

Quote:
When you share your AOL® Address Card with non-AOL members, your contact information is sent in vCard format, so it can be shared by different e-mail programs. AOL refers to vCards as Internet Address Cards. The vCard (.vcf) format is the standard method (like an electronic "business card") AOL uses to share contact information between AOL members and non-members. You can also import vCards (.vcf files) located on your computer into your Address Book by clicking File on the AOL® menu bar, then click the Open button.

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Answer 6

Aug 25, 2006 10:10 PM in response to Mike-N-nahyunil

I know they say they support vCards... but they don't. Or maybe it's just me they don't like. I have an AOL account that I use for my kids and I tried saving the vCards in 3.0 format and in 2.1 but neither one would import into the AOL address book, even though I followed their instructions to the letter. Maybe I need to try different encoding?

iMac G5, 14" iBook Mac OS X (10.4.7)

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Answer 7

Aug 26, 2006 4:40 AM in response to twirlingelephants

Apple put various things in the exported card that are not part of the v3 format; they should be ignored by applications that don't understand them, but maybe if you got rid of them AOL would be happier.

Here is an edited version of my vcard. If I had exported a group, there would be multiple set of information delimited by BEGIN:VCARD and END:VCARD.

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
N:Kinsella;Austin;;;
FN:Austin Kinsella
EMAIL;type=INTERNET;type=WORK;type=pref:ak@somehost.de
item1.EMAIL;type=INTERNET:ak@somehost.ie
item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<Other>!$_
EMAIL;type=INTERNET;type=HOME:ak@somehost.net
TEL;type=WORK;type=pref:000 1234567
TEL;type=HOME:000 7654321
item2.ADR;type=WORK;type=pref:;;somewhere;Carlow;;;Ireland
item2.X-ABADR:ie
X-ABUID:B5D0D0C7-2413-486C-B3B0-67120F13E3C9\:ABPerson
END:VCARD

The itemn prefixes are used to tie lines together, so one of the email addresses has an Apple label of Other, and the email line and the label line are both prefixed item1. If you leave all email fields either Work or Home, you won't get any of these in email lines; otherwise, I would try editing out the prefixes and the label line. Similarly, I would get rid of the item2. prefixes, and the X-ABADR line. Finally, in this example, I suspect you don't need the X-ABUID line, so delete that as well.

So, what I am suggesting is that you clean up a single or group vCard and see if AOL is happy with the result. It might help to try creating a vCard in AOL and see what that looks like for comparison. If it works, then we can worry about some form of automatic editing for the full job.

AK

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Answer 8

Aug 26, 2006 3:50 PM in response to Austin Kinsella1

Thanks, Austin, for your excellent suggestions. Unfortunately, they didn't work. And AOL doesn't allow export of vCards, only importing. You can buy a program to export them, but I didn't really want to do that just to see if I could get this to work.

I have discovered, however, that by accessing an AOL account on the web instead of using AOL as the ISP, .csv or .txt files with addresses can be imported as long as they have the right column headings. The imported addresses can then be accessed through the address book, even if one logs on to AOL directly. So I guess that I will export the addresses, and then let the AOL users know that they have to use AOL on the web to import them. Kind of a pain, but I guess it's better than having them re-enter everything I have already done.

If anyone has a better solution, I'm open to it, but for now I think this will be the best way.

iMac G5, 14" iBook Mac OS X (10.4.7)

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