Moving from Microsoft Office VBA to AppleScript:
MacTech's Guide to Making the Transition

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April, 2007
Page 139

Export Contacts to Excel

Let us finish with an example of a very useful interlinking of Entourage with Excel, as a demonstration of what can be done with Office AppleScript that would never have been possible when you were restricted to VBA. In fact, it would do you no good to do the Excel part of the script in VBA, since it cannot return results to AppleScript, not even using the run VB macro command that presently still works in 2004.

People often want to export information – usually contact information – from Entourage to Excel. At the moment the only way to do it without AppleScript is to export the entire address book (and only the local "On My Computer" one at that) to a tab-delimited text and then import the text file into Excel.

But then you're stuck with perhaps thousands of contacts you don't need, and about 65 fields, all of them, including columns for no fewer than 13 email addresses per contact, but missing the Category information that might be crucial. You have to spend hours manually deleting rows (contacts) and columns (fields). You could, perhaps, be a little more selective doing a mail merge to Word, but you still would not have your information in a format (a table) that you could get over to Excel.

With AppleScript, it's a cinch. For this example, I am choosing contacts by category – all contacts of the category "Work". You could make it whichever category you want, of course, or even a combination of categories. Or you could specify only contacts whose last name starts with "B" or contacts whose company is "Consolidated Fruit, Inc.", or any whose filter whatsoever on any field whatsoever.

Or you could select contacts in the address book or a custom view and get the selection, remembering to check the class of the items as several scripts above have done. Anything. You can specify only the fields you are interested in, and no more: no need to delete any columns over in Excel. In the example here, I have chosen 16 fields, but you might only need 3 or 4: perhaps only last name, first name, email and (work) phone. As usual, comments follow the script.

tell application "Microsoft Entourage"

     set theContacts to every contact where its category ¬

          contains {category "Work"} --OR:

     --set theContacts to the selection

     set allContactProps to {{"Last Name", "First Name", "Title", ¬

          "Company", "Department", "Email", "Work Phone", "Cell Phone", ¬

          "Home Phone", "Assistant", "Street", "City", "State", "Zip", ¬

          "Spouse", "Notes"}} -- header row as first sublist

     repeat with theContact in theContacts

          try

              set email to (first email address of theContact whose ¬

                   label is work)

          on error

              try

                   set email to default email address

              on error

                   set email to ""

              end try

          end try

          tell theContact

              set contactProps to {last name, first name, ¬

                   job title, company, department, email, business phone number, ¬