[X4U] export Address Book

[P. H. Adams]

On Dec 22, 2006, at 9:16 PM, Daly Jessup wrote:

> Right. I don't know if my post reached the list, but that was the  
> one I recommended too. But I also commented that at least when I do  
> it and get the CSV file and open that in Excel, the address data  
> (street, city, state, zip) all ends up in one cell, which makes it  
> less than idea if someone is wanting to put it into a labeling  
> program or something like that. It is not nicely formatted.

Just a couple of comments on that. A CSV (Comma Separated Value) file  
is itself just a flat text file that can be easily viewed and  
manipulated using a text editor. In fact, by using TextEdit (or  
something more powerful, e.g. TextWrangler, BBEdit, et al.) or even  
command line utilities (sed, awk, grep) you can do a search and  
replace on the commas and format the file pretty much any way you'd  
like in a fairly automated fashion. AppleScript or Perl (or another  
scripting language) can also be used if you really want to get  
aggressive.

It's not necessary to use Excel, but if you want to do it the "right"  
way, you don't want to just open the file. You will want to import by  
using the menu selection "Data -> Get External Data -> Import Text  
File..." In the resulting menu, select that you are importing a  
delimited text fle and in the next menu, choose comma as the  
delimiter. Other screens give further options, such as specifying the  
type of data in the field (text, date, number, etc.). When finished,  
the values should end up in neat columns in the worksheet.

-pha