My mom and dad recently moved from using AOL for email to using Apple’s Mail program. However, they couldn’t figure out how to transfer their AOL contact list to Apple’s Address Book. AOL does not provide any type of export functionality. Here are the steps I took to transfer their records to Apple’s address book.

1. Logged into AOL online and switched to the Accessible Version. There is a link to switch that’s part of the AOL mail footer.

2. Selected “Contacts” in the left navigation.

3. Went through each page of the address book and selected and then copied the table with Name, Email, and Phone columns into a text document. I used TextMate for this but I could have used any text editor.

4. Went through the text document and deleted the “[tab] Edit” links. Also checked to make sure that my document was consistently tab delimited. There should be a table between each field and a return at the end of each line.

5. Saved the file as a text document with a .txt extension.

6. Opened the txt file in Numbers. I could have also used OpenOffice. I then went through and deleted any rows that I didn’t want to transfer to my new Address Book.

7. Saved the new spreadsheet as a .csv file (Comma Separated File).

8. Imported the .csv file into Address Book using File > Import > Text File.