Comma Separated Values (windows or dos)??

[Cyroceon]

I am going to be switching over to a Macbook in the near future and I would like to bring all my contacts from outlook(which are also the ones on my iphone) to AddressBook on OSX. When exporting contacts there are two formats I can use, CSV Windows or CSV DOS. Which one of these would be read by AddressBook without a hitch? Thanks in advance, as I am just prepping my stuff so that the switch will be seamless.

 

[TEG]

Either. I believe the difference is how new lines are created. AddressBook can read both the LF/CR(DOS) and the CR(WIN) forms.

TEG

 

[JNB]

When in doubt, I generally recommend DOS, as it is pretty much guaranteed to not have any additional hidden formatting. not a huge issue, but prevents any "clean up" afterwards.

 

[Cyroceon]

I also found a way to highlight and drag all contacts into a backup folder as vCards. Is that better? That gives each individual contact his/her own vCard.

 

[TEG]

VCards work well as they are a defined standard format. That would make it much easier, then just drag them, en masse, to your address book.

TEG

 

[Gelfin]

I also found a way to highlight and drag all contacts into a backup folder as vCards. Is that better? That gives each individual contact his/her own vCard.

Provided it works, this is a much better option. vCards are a standard, but it's certainly not beyond Microsoft to deviate from a standard in ways that break competing products. Therefore, test whether AddressBook properly understands vCards generated by Outlook before you burn any bridges.

For reference, the information you've received about the difference between "Windows" and "DOS" encoding is not accurate. Windows and DOS use identical linebreak encoding (CRLF). The difference between the two would be important only if you have certain special characters in text fields, such as accented characters. If you export as Windows CSV, those fields will be encoded using the Windows-1252 code page. "DOS" encoding is typically Code Page 437, which is the mapping of characters used in old pre-Windows PCs. If you export as one and then import using a tool that expects the other, most things will look fine but you'll get some unexpected character substitutions if, say, you know someone with an umlaut in his name.

If you end up having to go that route, choose to export as Windows CSV, then when importing to Address Book change the Text Encoding field to "Western (Windows Latin 1)." vCards are still better if they work, though.

 

[Cyroceon]

VCards work well as they are a defined standard format. That would make it much easier, then just drag them, en masse, to your address book.

TEG

I got them as vCards and everything looks good. Thanks guys.