Import old contacts into Entourage

We have contacts in an old version of Address Book as well as some in AppleWorks. However, we now run Leopard 10.5.6 and use Entourage. How do I get the information out of these applications and into Entourage?

Getting your contacts out of Address Book and into Entourage couldn't be much easier. In Address Book choose the All entry in the Group pane, select Export from the File menu, and choose the Export Group vCard command. Save the resulting file to the Desktop.

Now open Entourage, select its Address Book icon at the top of the window, and drag the vCard you created into the main window. The contacts within the vCard will be added to Entourage.

AppleWorks is the tiniest bit trickier. It's likely that your addresses are stored in an AppleWorks database. So, open AppleWorks, open that database, and choose Save As from the File menu. In the Save dialog box that appears, choose ASCII Text from the File Format pop-up menu, save it as a document, name the file, and click Save.

In Entourage, choose Import from the File menu. In the Import window that appears, choose the Contacts or Messages From a Text File Option and click the Next button at the bottom of the window. In the Choose a File Type window, enable the Import Contacts From a Tab- or Comma-delimited Text File option and click the Next button. In the Import Text File window that appears, navigate to the AppleWorks file you exported as a text file and click Import.

An Import Contacts window will result. In this window, drag entries in the Unmapped Fields column to the right of the window to the appropriate mapped fields entries in the left column. For example, if an entry to the right reads Smith: Jones, drag it to the Last Name entry. When you do, it will appear next to that entry. Continue for all the entries in the Unmapped Fields area. When you're done, click the Import button and your contacts will be imported to Entourage's Address Book.

Note that after you import those contacts, Entourage will ask if you'd like to save that mapping. If you plan to import other contacts from AppleWorks at a later date, it's not a bad idea. That way you can choose your saved mapping from the Map Files Using pop-up menu that appears at the top of the Import Contacts window. Doing so will save all this dragging from the two fields columns.