How to Export Mac Contacts to CSV and Excel with 1 Click

This article mainly talks about how to export Mac contacts to CSV or Excel easily. Mac contacts are stored in the Contacts app, previously known as Address Book. Mac’s Contacts app supports three export formats: vCard, PDF and ABBU (as an archive file). But what if you need to export contacts from Mac Contacts to a comma-separated values file? There are two easy methods. And one of them enables you to do the export directly without having to converting contacts.

Method 1. How to export Mac contacts to CSV directly with ease

You can effortlessly export contacts from Mac’s Contacts app (and various other sources) to CSV with Cisdem ContactsMate, the best contact manager for Mac.

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1. Download ContactsMate and install it.
2. When you open it for the first time, click OK to permit access to your contacts.
3. Control-click On My Mac in the left sidebar and choose Export.
4. To export Mac contacts to CSV, select CSV from the Format dropdown list.
5. Select a location on your Mac to store the exported comma-separated values.
6. Click Save.

Tips

• The method allows you to control the fields to be exported. You can export Mac contacts with valid fields, all fields or custom fields. Things are easily customizable.
• To export Mac contacts to Excel spreadsheet, select Excel from the dropdown list in Step 4.
• By following the 6 steps above, you can straightforwardly export all Mac contacts to CSV. If you only need to export selected contacts, choose On My Mac in the sidebar, select the specific contacts in it, control-click and choose Export.
• The (Apple) Contacts app is also available for iOS. In addition, Apple provides a cloud-based contact management service known as iCloud Contacts. If you want to export contacts from these places, the same method can also help. Here are the instructions to export iCloud contacts to CSV and export iPhone contacts to CSV.

Method 2. How to export Mac contacts to CSV through conversion

With the first method, you can directly export Apple contacts to CSV from Mac (and iCloud and iPhone). This one is different. It involves conversion.

As mentioned above, Mac's Contacts app can export contacts to vCard. Also known as VCF, it's the primary export format of Apple contacts. You can export contacts to a vCard file first and then convert it to a comma-separated values file.

1. Open the Contacts app on Mac.
2. In the left sidebar, select All on My Mac (or a sub-group under it).
3. From the top menu bar, choose File > Export > Export vCard.
4. Choose a location to keep the file you are going to export. Click Save.
5. Open your web browser and visit vCard to LDIF/CSV Converter, an online tool.
6. Click Choose File. Select the exported vCard file. Click Open.
7. Click the Format dropdown list and choose CSV.
8. Select the option Comma as CSV (comma-separated values) files are generally separated by commas.
9. Make sure you select the box before Add header line.
10. Click Convert. Once the process is done, the CSV file will be automatically saved to your computer.

Compared to the first method, this one is a little bit complex. The online tool used here is easy to access and use. But there are a few limits. You need to upload your Mac contacts to the tool’s server. Also, there is a file size limit. In addition, the conversion may take quite a while if the vCard file is relatively large.

Bonus tip: How to prepare a CSV containing contacts for use

One of the common reasons to export Mac contacts to CSV file is to use the contacts in services that don't support vCard. For example, Shutterfly is one of the services.

Before you can properly import your Mac contacts (now in a CSV) into Shutterfly address book, you need to get the CSV file ready for import. To help you out, Shutterfly provides a CSV template. There are two options. You can make sure that the column headers in your CSV match those in the template. Or, you can copy contact information from your CSV into the columns in the template. Below are the column headers in the template.

• First Name
• Last Name
• Display/Household Name
• Address Line 1
• Address Line 2
• City
• State
• Postal Code
• Country
• Email

With other services, if such a template is not available, you can manually create one.

Benefit of exporting Mac contacts to CSV

vCard is a file format standard for storing contact information, but it's much less widely supported compared to CSV. CSV as a general and relatively simple file format is widely used in business and science field because that large number of programs all support CSV variant. It has been a widely used text file format. CSV files can be used with many services and apps such as Microsoft Excel, NeoOffice, LibreOffice and Intuit Quicken, etc. If you want to use your Mac contacts in such an app or service, CSV is the format you need. Also, by doing so, you are able to batch edit your contacts in Excel, which is super efficient.

Conclusion

If you are look for an easy, straightforward way to export Mac contacts to CSV file, I hope this article will help. To export Apple contacts to CSV, you can choose to do it directly with ContactsMate or by converting using a converter. If you have many contacts to export, organize and manage, it’s a good idea to get a powerful contact manager as the one used in the first method.