VCF to CSV conversion

I'm looking for VCF to CSV conversion software. I found this one --- http://www.unc.edu/vtoc --- on these discussion pages, **t it seems to only convert 1 VCF file at a time. I have 9,000+ VCF files to convert. They were dragged out of MS Outlook for Mac 2016, and I want to import these contacts into Excel, which will not import VCF files or even Outlook’s OLM export file format. For some reason, the MS developers decided to design Office for Mac 2016 in such a way that one leg of the suite can't communicate with the other.

I'm using OS X 10.11.3

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.2)

Posted on Jan 29, 2016 5:59 AM

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6 replies

Jan 29, 2016 8:28 AM in response to grglaser

According to the site below, multiple VCF files can be easily merged into single VCF file.

http://www.file-extensions.org/article/open-split-merge-convert-vcf-contact-file s

However the command "cat ..." may have trouble in your case because of too many files.

So, try the command below instead.

find . -type f -name \*.vcf \! -name merged.vcf -exec cat \{\} \; > merged.vcf


Hope this can be your help.

Jan 29, 2016 6:15 AM in response to grglaser

This is what probably happened when the MS developers got round a table and decided on the design of Outlook for Mac.


…Ok team how can we make Outlook for Mac really, really annoying for users. What important feature that Outlook for Windows has can we remove this time.


As it happens in this case Apple will come to your rescue.


A .vcf file is a vcard file, one can hope the Microsoft have not added some horrible proprietaryness to it. As such Apple's own Contacts application should be able to import .vcf files and I believe important them all in one go.


Once you have all the contacts in Apple's Contacts application you can then use this tool to convert them to a csv file.


See http://contactssyncer.com/wordpress/?page_id=48

Jan 29, 2016 6:23 AM in response to John Lockwood

Thanks for the reply. I have other ideas about what might have transpired around that MS conference table, but I'll keep this discussion clean.


I tried to drag all 9,000+ VCF files into Apple Contacts, but that failed, probably because 9,000+ are too much. I tried to import them via the import tool, but that failed: I wasn't allowed to “select all” from the folder with the VCF files. I then tried to drag them into Apple Contacts in batches, about 1,000 at at time. After about 3,000 were successfully dragged into Apple Contacts, no more were allowed.


I'm stumped, thus I thought that perhaps if I were able to convert all 9,000+ VCF files to CSV files in one batch, I could then import them into Excel and also Apple Contacts.

Jan 29, 2016 7:28 AM in response to grglaser

Another approach to consider is that apparently you can import vCards in to Google Mail and you can also export as a csv file from Google Mail. However 9000 contacts is a large amount so it may also struggle.


Beyond the above I suspect we are now moving in to the territory of needing to buy a commercial solution although still a cheap one.


One final approach to consider is to import say 2000 in to contacts, convert that 2000 to a csv, then delete that 2000 from Contacts, import then next batch, and repeat.


Once you have converted all the batches to several separate csv files it will be easy enough to import them all in to a single Excel file or to use a text editor to combine them in to a single file.

Jan 29, 2016 7:28 AM in response to John Lockwood

Unfortunately, I tried this with Google Mail, and like Apple Contacts, it will only allow me to import one VCF file at a time.


Your other solution sounds workable. I’ll still look for a 3rd-party VCF-CSV conversion tool, but so far I've only found those for PC-based computers, not for a Mac OS.


Getting back to another part of our discussion, the wonderful MS developers of Office for Mac 2016 made another unforgivable error when they removed the ability to export Outlook contacts/mail/etc as a TXT file. Now it's only available to export as an OLM file, which no address book software I've ever come across can read or import, and as I previously wrote, not even the sister Office for Mac 2016 program, Excel, and understand OLM.


There must be too much coffee and ‘other stuff’ in Seattle distracting the well-paid MS developers.

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VCF to CSV conversion

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