How To Mail Merge Apple Address Book with Microsoft Word
Given that there is no easy way to simply export contacts held in Apple’s Address Book application for Mac OS X, it makes it nigh on impossible to actually use the data for a mail merge in MS word. Now that’s fine if you only wish to print labels, but what about if you want to uset he data for printing labels, envelopes and even letters?
In this article I provide a quick run through on how to export the data from Apple Address Book into a format (tab separated values or TSV) that can then be read by the Microsoft Word Mail Merge process.
Exporting Contacts from Address Book in TSV
In order to export the contacts you wish to merge, you need to download nifty utility appropriately entitled Address Book Exporter. This is a freeware application and can be downloaded from the X website and can be used to generate a file that contains any or all of the contacts, or even one of your pre-defined groups.
To create the contacts list in TSV, open Address Book Exporter. In the widow that apears you are given a list of the available contact groups to export, starting with ALL and then listing your personal groups in alphabetical order. On the right you will notice 2 export options: Export using current fields, or Export using template, with a further drop down selection of: Entourage, Outlook, Palm Desktop or Yahoo. The second is handy for exporting your address book for import to these applications or services, but are not of use for the purpose of Mail Merge, so for leave this on the default option.
To alter the required fields for export, click the “Configure Settings” button top right, which will produce a drop down dialog. From this select the desired entries, and then click “Ok”. Having selected the desired export group, click “Export Address Book” top left of the main window, chosing the desired save location from the save dialog drop that appears.
Now that you have the contacts exported in TSV – tab-separated value – format you are ready to go into MS word and get mail merging.
Step 1 – Setting Up the Mail Merge in Microsoft Word
To get started in MS Word, you need to select “Mail Merge Manager” from the “Tools” drop menu. This opens up a supplementary screen (displayed right), from which you can then manage the process of importing the contacts and then creating the desired template ready for the mail merge and then printing.
To kick things off you need to click “Create New” and select the document type you require for your mail merge. This can be any of Form letters, Labels, Envelopes, or Catalog. Having selected the document type and taken the appropriate steps thereafter to select the size, and other options, you are ready to move on to selecting the data source you just exported from Addresss Book.
Step 2 – Selecting the Recipients List and Using Your Exported Contacts
Clicking the “Get List” drop menu in section 2 of the Mail merge Manager, produces a choice of options, including: NewData Source, Open Data Source, Office Address Book and Filemaker Pro. If you select “Open Data Source” an open dialog will appear, from which you can select the exported TSV file created with Address Book Exporter.
The initial import step will ask yo to select the text encoding for the file, which you can of course leave as the default option and simply click “OK”. Once this is done mail merge will change according, activating the data management icons and opening up step three, in preparation for you to drag and drop the data placeholders onto your document.
Step 3 – Inserting The Placeholders
The placeholders drop section of the Mail Merge Manager window is split into two tabs: Contacts and More. The “Contacts” tab contains all the field headers form the exported file, and which of course denote the data from the related contact record. The “More” tab provides access various mail merge tags used for repeating data, handling of empty fields, and more.
To set up your document with the palceholders, simply drag and drop the desired entries in turn onto the document itself and move them around accordingly, being sure not to edit or change them as you do.
With the content ready and the data placeholders in position you are pretty much ready to merge and then print the documents.
Step 4 – Filtering The Recipients List
If you wish to “sort” or “filter” the list of acontacts being merged, then step 4 is the place to do it. I often find it handy to actually sort the contacts by last name so that when you are looking through a set of labels for 1600 people you can easily sift through the pages and find the person easily, rather than to have to eyeball every single page.
You can use the filter options to process a large list of contact in batches, and make the entire process a little more manageable. It also means you can pick up where you might have left off in a previous merge.
To filter or sort the list, simply click “Options” and follow the instructions in the tabbed dialog window that appears.
Step 5 – Previewing The Results of Your Mail Merge
Once the placeholders are formatted within the design and confines of your mail merge document, it is worth previewing them. This can be done easily from section 5, and merely requires you to toggle the “ABC” button, which switches out the placeholders for actual data and then for you to run backwards and forwards through the data set using the left and right arrows accordingly.
This is the best way to ensure that you can print out the labels, envelopes or letters with a minimum of error and waste, not just of paper, but also of your time in trying to correct the documents that came out looking wrong.
Step 6 – Completing The Task
With the mail merge document template titivated and prepped as desired, you can then either mail merge the template and records directly to your printer, or, as I would suggest, merge them directly to a new document, which can then be printed from. The available optionsfor selecting records, includes: all, current or custom, from which you can select the start and end record identifiers as a range from which to print.
Conclusion: As Easy As Pi
With the availability of applications such as Address Book Exporter for Mac OS X, the process of actually running a mail merge, whether it be for invitations, monthly journals, information letters, or more, directly from the data contained within Apple Address Book, is made simple.
I still can’t quite understand why Apple doesn;t integrate soem form of export into CSV or TSV function in Address Book itself, but at least with the plethora of availabel export apps that are FREE, you wont need to shell out any more cash than you have already for Mac OSX itself.
June 2nd, 2009 at 12:47 am
Thank you so much for your article. It was so very helpful!
September 30th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
THANK YOU!!!!!
October 1st, 2009 at 1:40 am
Thanks. That was a very simple and extremely helpful solution.
October 7th, 2009 at 10:52 am
THANK YOU!!! This was simple and accurate. I really appreciate you taking the time to post this information.
November 19th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
I have a list of names, addresses, etc done in a table format. I want to make labels for these 250 names but when I do Open Data in Step 2 it says: can’t open because it is not a data or header source and is an active mail merge document. What does that mean?? I have a Snow Leopard and need some help.
November 20th, 2009 at 5:28 am
when you say table format what do you mean? in numbers? in excel? in csv?
January 19th, 2010 at 2:16 pm
I have a list of names and addresses stored in a Pages document. I wish to print the list out on Avery mailing labels. I am running MAC OSX. Is there a way to do this directly or do I have to keyboard the list into Address Book?
January 19th, 2010 at 2:36 pm
That would depend on the format of them and how they can or not be easily imported into numbers, if you have that, because you could do a mail merge from there.
April 21st, 2010 at 12:52 pm
I was thankful for find this article; however, so far it isn’t working for me. There isn’t a mail merge manager feature under tools in microsoft word–but rather a data merge feature, which looks similar though not exactly the same. For step two, “open data source” is grayed out so I cannot select it. How do I remedy this problem? I am using snow leopard and word for mac 2004. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!
April 24th, 2010 at 4:51 pm
Tracy – I am unable to replicate what you describe. Where you abel to remedy this at all? Vincent =
April 27th, 2010 at 11:10 am
does anyone know if it is possible (and with what program) to create a mailing
label for bulk mail – it has to have an added line “or current resident” under the
name. Can’t figure out how to make Address Book accept the additional field…..
HELP !
April 27th, 2010 at 12:04 pm
In Address Book if you create a group, you can then use that group in Apple Mail. Is that what you had in mind Denise?
April 27th, 2010 at 8:35 pm
hi Vincent – I do have a group with my mailing list addresses – the problem is creating a label with a name, then “or current occupant” then the address…. couldn’t find any way to add the second line I need to be able to do a bulk mailing…..even went to a session with the techy guys at the apple store and they didn’t know how to make it happen
April 27th, 2010 at 8:37 pm
I thought I could use one of the other fields – department or title or something but then there was no way to use that field in the label!
May 27th, 2010 at 6:31 am
I want to insert a full address from Apple Address to MS Word – e.g., I am writing a letter and want to put the person’s full address at the top. How do I perform such a function?
May 27th, 2010 at 8:29 am
William -
You need to set up a template with the letter in the same way you would create a label list, and then specify it as the template to be used when doing the merge. If that makes sense. To do so, use the “Form Letter” option when you click “create” in the mail merge manager palette.
August 3rd, 2010 at 6:37 am
Thank you! Made a mistake first with selecting the wrong entries (had home addresses but selected ‘work’ in export). After I figured that out it worked a treat!
February 10th, 2011 at 8:36 pm
HELP. I accidentally merged ALL of my contacts into one address book entry. Now, not surprisingly, that file crashes if i try to open it. I have all the information in my iphone, I just want to delete all the contents of the address book and start fresh but I can’t get it to open. Should i trash the application? Is there somewhere I can redownload it? PLEASE HELP!? Thanks :)
February 10th, 2011 at 11:34 pm
Mike = I would try moving/backup up the application data files in:
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/
and then re-opening the app to start afresh.
Best, Vincent -
February 11th, 2011 at 4:08 pm
Thanks so much for your help Vincent. Unfortunately I only got as far as /addressbook. Not sure how to ‘reopen the app to start afresh’. my options include:
ABPerson.skIndexInverted
ABSubscribedPerson.skIndexInverted
AddressBook.data
AddressBook.data.previous
Images
I’ve clicked on all 5 options but where to go from here is unclear. Might you have a further suggestion? I’d be eternally grateful as this is holding me back setting up several other aspects of my computer (Ichat is affected by this bogus card in my address book). Thanks again for getting me this far!
February 11th, 2011 at 5:53 pm
Mike – Simply move that older somewhere safe, and then start AddressBook again, it should recreate everything it needs. Best, Vincent =
March 22nd, 2011 at 3:03 pm
I just switched from PC to Mac, and I need to do the opposite: I have all my contacts in mailing label word document and I need to get them into my Mac address book. I have tried cutting and pasting and converting to CSV with Excel, but this is not working right importing- the address fields will not list properly. Is there an easier way to get the mailing labels into the Address book?
March 23rd, 2011 at 4:56 am
I am not sure if there is an easy way, maybe so, that I haven’t researched or investigated. Assuming there are not too many, I would copy and paste them into a text document, do a series of string replaces, to convert all the addresses into CSV. There would still be residual work to clean up the details, but much easier to focus on than to spend all your time copying and pasting back and forth. Good luck!
July 15th, 2011 at 12:17 am
Thank you! Thank you!
December 11th, 2011 at 12:15 am
When I do the final merge it is only putting one or two addresses in per page – do you know how to fix this? Thanks!
December 11th, 2011 at 5:16 am
It could be there is something wrong with the merge template. I suppose other options might include a software bug, so ensure you always have the latest update for MS Office. This is something I am yet to see personally in my travels. Best, Vincent =
December 15th, 2011 at 2:34 pm
I got all the way through the tutorial and merged both into a doc and also straight to printer. When I previewed it before clicking print, there was nothing there – absolutely nothing. When I printed it, again, there was nothing at all there. I can see it on the ‘envelope’ when I’m dropping fields in and when I ‘preview’ using the ABC button but something must be going wrong when I merge them. Any ideas?
December 15th, 2011 at 2:51 pm
Ok, in trying one last time, this is actually what Word is popping up and telling me. “WORD COULD NOT FINISH MERGING THESE DOCUMENTS OR INSERTING THIS DATABASE” Thanks for any advise!