Microsoft Outlook Contacts to OS X Address Book

A few months ago (sometime in december), when I switched phones I needed to convert my Address Book entries from my Powerbook to Microsoft Outlook on my PC. I remember having spent days looking for a solution but couldn't get any. So I decided to use my skills.

All I did was to write an AppleScript that converted all the entries in my AddressBook into XML. Then I wrote a compatible VBA script in Microsoft Outlook to import the resulting XML file. It only took me about 2 hours to get everything right (how the heck did I spend so much time looking for something like this online when I could do it myself?). I wanted to build a nice interface and make the scripts available for free, but I never got time to do it. I probably will sometime this year as I know this is something many people would love to have. I think I can probably extend the script into moving stuff from iCalendar to Outlook Calendar etc...

Anyways, I am switching phones again tomorrow (not that I want to, but something happened to my current phone). The new phone I am getting is a Sony Ericsson Z608. The features are impressive and for the price it is going for, I just couldn't resist. One nice feature of this phone compared to my current Motorola is the fact that it is possible to use iSync and synchronize most of the stuff via bluetooth to the PowerBook.

Since I reinstalled OS X sometime ago, most of my data was gone including the entries in Address Book. So I needed to get my contacts this time from Microsoft Outlook to Address Book. So basically, all we have to do is to convert the MS Outlook contacts to a group VCard. One major problem is that this is not possible in MS Outlook. The application only gives users the option to export one contact at a time as a vCard (geez, how more stupid could they get?). So I figured out that I could spend the whole night searching on Google for applications that could do this easily or I had to write one myself using VBA.

It turned out that after 2 hours, my franctic search for such an application yielded some positive results. Among most of the solutions I have tested, the best one by far (IMHO) is OutPod. It worked great! In less than 5 mns, I had converted all my contacts to a group vCard, put the file in a shared directory, accessed it on the PowerBook and dragged it to AddressBook. If you are facing the same problems, I strongly recommend you have a look at OutPod.

So all I have to do tomorrow is to use iSync with the Z608 and I'm good to go! ;-)