Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now.
Today I am going to show you a trick to be able to export or print your contacts with
the help of Numbers.
Back in Episode 732 I showed you some of the cool printing functionality in the Contacts
App on your Mac.
A lot of people have expressed disappointment that it can't print things exactly like they
want.
It is a quick and dirty print function that is kind of neat but if you want customization
it is not going to work.
There is a way to print your contacts just about anyway that you want.
So you would think that if you want to customize the output of Contacts anyway you want the
thing that you would do is export and then you can import them into a program and print
them as you want.
But the export options are pretty limited.
You could export as vCard or as Contacts Archive.
Neither of which could be imported into anything like say a spreadsheet like Numbers.
You can also drag and drop but drag and drop just creates a vCard file as well.
So how do you get these into say Numbers which then allows you to format, sort, print anything
you want.
Well the answer for so many problems on the Mac is to simply drag and drop.
Usually it is a simple problem that you are solving with drag and drop.
But this case is a more complex one.
I'm going to go into Numbers here and create a new document.
Just a quick blank document here.
Shrink the window down a bit.
Now we are going to see what happens if I were to drag and drop contacts.
I am actually going to select a contact here.
I'm going to hit Command A to grab them all.
So all of the contacts I am going to drag them and drop them into Numbers.
Now what it is going to do is it is going to say "Is it OK for Numbers to allow contacts"?
This is a privacy issue here so once I have allowed Numbers to access my contacts I can
now complete the drag and drop.
Look what happens.
Drag and drop creates this table.
It is actually different than this table here.
So I am actually going to switch back and forth between the two tables.
I am going to delete the initial table there that I had just leaving this table here that's
imported from contacts.
You can see how nicely it actually formatted everything here putting the phone number in
a column and the first name and last name and email address right there for me to be
able to get to very easily.
So I can now sort as I want.
So I can sort by say the last name, it already is of course but I can sort by something else
if I wanted to.
I can format this in different ways.
Anything you want to do inside of Numbers you can do.
Make a whole column bold.
Add headers and footers.
Do anything that you want.
Delete an entire column so if I didn't want the email addresses here just delete it.
Then I can shrink the text and print it out anyway I want.
Or export from Numbers here into some other format.
Now you may say wait a minute.
I only get first name, last name, phone and email.
I've got other things in here like address.
Where are those?
Well if I click on the table here you can see it is column B, C, J, and S. Interesting.
So there are hidden columns in this.
So all I need to do is basically Unhide Column.
You see there are options here for doing this.
Let me Unhide All Columns and now I've got a ton of information here.
Everything that is in every contact.
Every bit of information that is there.
So I can go and Hide the columns I want to hide or use the entire thing.
There is another cool thing that you can do.
Start off with a blank sheet here.
I am going to add a Table to it with just some basic headers and I'm going to in the
Headers I am going to put the exact name of fields from Contacts.
It has to be exact.
So in this case I've just included First Name, Last Name, Company, and email.
These are exact field names.
I am going to go into Contacts, Select All, and drag and drop into this table and it is
smart enough to figure out that I just want these four columns here and it populates them.
So you can basically pre make your spreadsheet and then drag and drop.
It didn't create a new table at all.
It just used the one I had and populated the columns appropriately.
So there you go.
Combining Contacts and Numbers you can export your contacts, format them, sort them, and
print them anyway you want.
Hope you found this useful.
Until next time this is Gary with
MacMost Now.