In OS X 10.4 , one of Address Book ’s features is the gentle exportation of contacts tovCards — just drag and cast off any one contact ’s name from Address Book to your Desktop ( for instance ) , and a young vCard will be created for that contact . you may then import this vCard into any applications programme that supports the standard , including Entourage and Outlook on Windows .
If you try this same drag - and - drop trick with multiple impinging selected in Address Book , you ’ll find that the Mac creates one vCard filing cabinet , name something like Sally Sample and five others . While this seems like a decent timesaver , certain program ( Entourage and Outlook , to name two ) can not handle these multiple vCards . Drop your newly - exported multiple vCard onto Entourage , for instance , and only the first contact will show up . These programs can care only one striking per vCard , so you need to export them that way from Address Book . But does that stand for you postulate to manually haul - and - drop each contact you wish to transplant ?
Thankfully , no . The whoremaster is to apply the Option Francis Scott Key when dragging your contacts out of Address Book . But you have to use the Option Florida key before you start up your drag operation — if you maintain the Option key down after you start tangle your selection , you ’ll wind up with a single vCard filing cabinet contain the select contact . First make your selection in Address Book , then press the pick key and agree it down . Now click and have got the mouse over your selection for about a 2nd , then drag the contact to your Desktop ( or other location ) . If you ’ve done everything aright , you ’ll be rewarded with single vCards for each contact in your extract .
Once you have the individual vCards , you may import them into Entourage or Outlook — Entourage will gladly admit all of them at once , for instance , if you embroil and drop the whole excerption of exported files onto its Dock icon . While it ’d be neat if these programs understood the multiple vCard format , at least Address Book provides a relatively simple method of creating single vCards from a selection .
