MAC TREAT #120: Use vCards for Easy Contact Management
Recently my good friend Andrea purchased a new MacBook Pro. It was fairly easy for her to migrate data from the old Mac to the new one, which one important exception: her Daylite contacts couldn’t be accessed on the new machine. Fortunately, she still had the old Mac, and was able to access Daylite contacts on that machine. But how to get the contacts over to the new machine? vCards to the rescue!
vCards are electronic versions of old-fashioned Rolodex cards. They provide the fastest way to import contacts into your Mac’s Address Book app, or to share your Address Book contacts with friends, family, or colleagues. vCards contain basic contact information (such as name, address, phone, and email). They can also contain information such as including URLs, photos, or logos.
The vCard format works cross-platform with many contacts programs, including Microsoft Outlook and Gmail, making it easy to exchange contacts with people who don’t use Address Book in Mac OS X.
Apple recently published a Pro tip about vCards and address book that is worth sharing:
To export a vCard from Address Book on your Mac, just highlight the contact and drag it to your desktop or directly into an email. (The file icon even looks like a Rolodex card.) To import a vCard into Address Book, drag the card-shaped icon into your open Address Book application or onto the Address Book icon in your Dock or Applications folder. Address Book opens (if not already open) and asks you to verify the import. Click Import to have Mac OS X store the vCard’s contact information in Address Book.
Share contacts by dragging vCards to and from Address Book.
Want to export more than one contact from Address Book? Just Command-click to select multiple contacts, and drag them to the desktop or into an email. This method collects all the highlighted contacts in a single vCard file. (Note that although Address Book allows you to export multiple contacts in a single file, Microsoft Outlook only lets you import a single contact per file.)
When you drag this combined vCard into Address Book, all the contacts are added at once as separate Address Book contacts. So with vCards and Address Book, it’s as easy to share a large group of names as it is to share a single contact.
Back to Andrea and the Daylite dilemma. We that discovered Daylite can export contacts as vCards. From there it was a simple matter of exporting all the Daylite contacts as a group vCard, which she simply emailed to herself. On the new MacBook Pro, she simply double clicked on the group vCard, and added all her Daylite contacts to her Mac’s Address Book. She could then sync those contacts with her iPhone.