I've also recently found it useful to create a Text Factory in BBEdit 8, which can then be used in BBEdit or TextWrangler (which is now free, as BBEdit Lite was), to modify plain text contact exports. Depending on your needs and grep skill, it may be a little more automatic than opening an export file up in Excel for editing. (A side effect of editing such files in Excel is that when you save it back to text, you'll generally get fields that had spaces in them quoted, which doesn't work well for Entourage imports, at least.)
I was just able to take a crazy Excel spreadsheet (no semblance of data separated into columns) and after a bit of work, create a Text Factory that would process it into a tab-delimited file I could use to import into Entourage. I went to this trouble because I may be doing it several times over a year, so it was worth my while -- and now I can redistribute the Text Factory and people can run it on their own, in Text Wrangler. Text Factories are kind of like creating a limited Perl script, but without flow control, complete power, and funny symbols. But yeah, if you can use vCards, that generally seems like the way to achieve the richest data exchange. -- Jeremy Reichman Information and Technology Services Rochester Institute of Technology -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
