When I feel most alive … go ahead, take your shoes off!

In my first post about metadata in Address Book, I think I forgot to mention that the real benefit in adding tags to your contacts individually is that they can then be indexed using spotlight on those tags. You don’t need to tag your contacts to be able to put them in groups together. You can just use regular Groups and manually drag the contacts you want into them, instead of using smart groups, but if you put tags in the Note section, you might as well use Smart Groups, and then you also get the power of Spotlight knowing about that information as well!

So today I just wanted to add some contacts to my Address Book. I had a list in an excel document with all their contact info that was sent to me, so I figured that I could simply export the Excel spreadsheet to CSV (comma separated values) or a tab delimited text file, and then Address Book’s import text file feature could handle it from there.

So I exported to a CSV and TXT file with no problem from Excel. Then I pulled up the import in Address Book and it really nicely let me match up the fields in Address Book with those in the text file using the headers in the first row and ignore the first record. I could even click forward and backwards through the contacts I was about to import. It seemed nice and dandy until I went to click “OK” and NOTHING HAPPENED! It just sat there like it had no idea I had just clicked “OK”!

Why is there an import feature if it doesn’t work??? How hard can it be to import a text file? I could write a program to do this! In 9th grade!

Apparently I’m not the only one to have some problems with Address Book’s import “feature”. Paul Thurrott experienced similar difficulties and mentioned them in his very thorough and good review of Tiger

Apple, I love Tiger and the Update to the iApps, but please, please give me a reason to stick around and use them instead of running off to software that actually does what it claims to do, and does what I need it to do!

It would be pretty sad if I had to figure out and write an apple script or Automator workflow to simply import some contacts (something that Address should definitely be able to do!)

Anyone else had bad luck importing into Address Book? Let me know about it.

Here is a script I wrote, the Contact Tagger

Contact Tagger.scpt

This is my first test post with Ecto to my new WP based blog on Blogsome! Here goes! All the posts before this are ones that I imported from Blogger. Here’s a nice picture of us hanging out at the beach a few weeks ago!