AB2CSV 4+

I mainly wanted to get my contacts into an Excel file as a basic, human-readable back-up since my Apple Address Book program has had issues syncing lately. The app works, despite some of the other comments on this page.

One issue I found is that empty cells are left as blanks in the CSV output as opposed to, say, an "NA" character. A simple find-replace is complicated by the fact that commas are present in my notes as well as being used as a delimiter. Luckily, there is an option in the Preferences to use a semi-colon or pipe (|) instead. Then, one can replace two consecutive pipes with "|NA|" in a text editor before reading it into Excel. An option to replace blanks with NA would be helpful to avoid having to take these extra steps.

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 Apple 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 Mac, I needed to open Excel first and then do “File” -> “Open” and select the AB2CSV .csv file in order to have Excel for Mac 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!

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.