Abe

Abe is a small utility designed to read your Address Book data base and turn it into a text field which subsequently can be saved as either a plain text or rtf file. Exporting data to a plain text or rtf file is accomplished by selecting the file option in the File | Export As | … submenu. The saved file can be formatted in the text or word processor of your choice.

Future versions may provide a more sophisticated capacity to print, but this version will provide a hard copy. Better printing results can be obtained by opening the saved file in a text or word processor. Abe provides no capability, at present, to export this data as a spreadsheet. Other utilities have been written to do that.

History: The motivation for this utility came about when my daughter asked for my contacts so she could send out wedding invitations. She did not want to add vCards to her address book, she just wanted a list of names and addresses. This proved surprisingly difficult to do with the Address Book Application.

Upon launching the application, Abe presents a window the top half of which is a chooser panel similar to the one in Address Book. (See below.) You may choose either individual contact names or the groups which you have defined. Select a group and/or contact within a group by clicking on the choice. If you wish to examine the entire group, click the button labeled "Group". If you wish to examine the contact, click the button labeled "Name". The Group and Name buttons are located at the bottom of the window. The Help (?) button displays this page.

Multiple choices are fully supported. After choosing a group or contact, you may add contiguous choices by shift clicking. Discontinuous choices can be added by control (⌘) clicking.