AB2CSV for PC and Mac

Software Reviews and Criticism

• By BoliviaKid

  Worked Great

  The app worked exactly as described, exporting my OS X Contact list to a CSV file which I then imported into Excel. I needed to create a mail-merge address list to print envelopes and this app was the bridge to get me from Microsoft Contacts to Excel. I read the documentation first (after reading a few of the reviews) so I knew what to do. I only wanted to export a subset of the entire contact list and only certain fields. By setting up the AB2CSV preferences before running the export it worked as advertised. Well worth the 99 cents in the time it saved me! For me, using Office 2016 for Windows, I needed to open Excel first and then do “File” -> “Open” and select the AB2CSV .csv file in order to have Excel for Windows go through the CSV import wizard. If you just try to open the CSV by double-clicking it from Finder it won’t import the CSV correctly and you end up with all of the data in the first column (as was mentioned in a previous review). I suspect that’s a problem with Excel, not the CSV file. Regardless, it worked for me and I can give it 5 stars for working like a champ and doing what it said it would do!

  
  
• By RussellK

  Better than expected

  This app worked perfectly, first time. It was far more customizable than I expected, and gave me a perfect CSV file of my Contacts contact list. I don't know about importing into other programs -- I know some email programs can't handle a CSV file with blank records, but if the record is blank in the contact list it will be blank in the CSV as well. I imported it into Excel, and each category I chose to import from Contacts was a column, each contact was a row. It was so fast that I thought it hadn't worked, but it was perfect. Note for Excel use. Excel doesn't correctly recognize CSV files on the double-click. You need to open Excel, then choose Import, then CSV. Or choose Open and select the file. In the dialog box that comes up, first choose "Delimited" (rather than fixed length); on the next screen, choose "Comma" as the separator (and deselect all the others). There's an option for "Treat Repeating Delimiters as One." Be sure that is NOT checked, or blank fields will be skipped and the records will end up in the wrong columns.

  
  
• By UncleEliot

  Nifty utility

  The user interface is a little too sparse for my tastes but I'm sure others love it. This program did its work perfectly and I was able to use the generated CSV file to import my contacts to my flaky email provider. I wish there was more granular control over which fields are included in the export (especially for the VCF format). I'd also suggest adding separate "CSV" and "VCF" buttons to the main window to make that a bit easier than chooing different modes from the pull down. I opened the CSV in Excel and everything looked good. A few of my contacts had a single "double quote" character in the notes field and that seems to have resulted in an inaccurate export where all remaining fields for that contact showed up in the notesfield and not being properly split my Excel. I'm going to reach out to the developer and see if they can fix that or if it's just an issue with the csv format and Excel. I still think this is a great utility.

  
  
• By Roy, the Successful

  It works.

  I don't normally write reviews, but this application has been maligned terribly here. After reading through both the pros and the cons, I could see that the haters really didn't understand what a comma deliminated file is. It is simply a text file that has the data fields seperated by commas. OK? That means that as many have discovered, you can't just open the file with Excel and be happy. You have to import it. So how do you do that? In Excel, under the 'File' menu is an item called 'Import.' Select that. The menu box under that will lead you through the obvious. The most obvious being the first two steps. You are importing a CSV file. Click that radio button. Then you will be lead to another box that will ask you to select the data you want to import. There is a little more than that, but I already feel like I've given you enough to work on. Just remember that the program works. If it isn't doing what you want, you probably aren't IMPORTING the data properly into Excel. And from Excel, you can export the information into other formats. Have fun.

  
  

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