Export Address Book Groups

[Decker 12]

I am bewildered by this problem:

How do you Export (and then import) groups of Contacts you've made in an
address book in Entourage 2008?

For instance, Mary makes a Group in her Address book with 10 email addresses
in it. Lets call it Accounting. She wants Jane to have this Group on her
Entourage.

When I do an Export and subsequent Import, the contents of the Group are not
maintained. Jane gets an Accounting "contact", which contains the email
address field of "(e-mail address removed), (e-mail address removed),
(e-mail address removed)" etc (notice the comma and space).

During the Export, I get some randomness about "Groups cannot be exported,
you must make a Note and copy it to a Note"? What does that mean? I've tried
to follow the instructions but it doesn't work - the Note becomes a text
snippet of everyone's email address, and it never gets back into that "Group"
format I am used to seeing in my Address Book.

I'm baffled by this. Is it me, or is it impossible to export a Group from
and to Entourage? I've tried dragging the group to the desktop (it just
creates a Text snippet, kind of like the Note procedure, above). I've tried
all the various Export options (CSV, RGE, etc) and none of them re-import the
group as it should.

What am I missing here?

 

[Diane Ross]

How do you Export (and then import) groups of Contacts you've made in an
address book in Entourage 2008?

You do not have to enter a group contact in your Address Book BUT I advice
you do so. If you ever have problems recovering a damaged database it's
almost impossible to salvage your groups.

If you add each group member as a contact in the Address Book you can then
assign a category to that contact. If you have several, I suggest you use a
naming convention like:

Group:Soccer
Group:Accounting

Remember you can have multiple categories assigned to a category.

Now that you have all of your group contacts in your Address Book with a
category assigned, you can export. File --> Export --> Select category from
popup select the group category. This exports as an Entourage archive (.rge)
file. If you are sharing only with another Entourage user, you can stop
here. If not, see this link for how to create a tab delimited file.

Import Export Contacts
<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/import_export/contacts.html#group>

You can also use Paul Berkowitz's Export-Import scripts. Shareware. Might be
a bit easier.

ScriptBuilders: Export-Import Entourage 1.3.10
<http://scriptbuilders.net/files/exportimportentourage1.3.10.html>