Apple Archives

October 31, 2005

Windows to Mac migration

After years and years my father is finally "Back to the Mac". I have been migrating his data and I ran into some problems which we're quite annoying.

First was migrating my father's Favorites from Internet Explorer to Safari. This is actually quite easy. Simply go to the Export function in the File menu of IE. Export the Favorites to an HTML file. Now pay attention. The file is named with the .htm extension. You cannot import this into Safari, because Safari desires the .html extension. Rename the file and simply use "Import Bookmarks..." in the Safari File-menu. Choose Bookmarks-menu and then "Show All Bookmarks". Your imported bookmarks are in a seperate folder here.

Second issue. Exporting Outlook Express mail. There were several ways to do this, but most included a couple of shareware applications, exporters and other hoops to jump trough. However this Mac OS X hints article pointed me in another direction. So I installed Mozilla Thunderbird on the Windows XP machine. Opened it. I chose to Import Settings from Outlook Express. After this copy your Mozilla Thunderbird profile (located in your hidden Application Data\Mozilla Thunderbird directory) to the Mac. I then followed the hints in the article. What was import btw. is not to select the actual .mbox. You have to select the directory which contains the .mbox files. Mail.app will then look in all the subdirs for these .mbox files and all your mail should be imported in a breeze.

Last issue revolved around the old Address Book application my father was using on his Windows machine. He had been using a seperate application because he was keeping addresses for his Club in it as well and was using it to print labels. I exported the data as CSV, but I had to edit the data in MS Excel because a lot of columns were outdated and needed to be removed, the charset had to be converted, all columns/rows had to be validated etc. I then tried to save as CSV again, but the columns still had fields with the comma character in them. So I choose "Text (tab delimeted)" instead. Now the problem was that this couldn't be imported into Apple's Address Book. It seems it's CSV importer is quite picky. So what now? Did a bit of googling around and found this great online CSV2vCard utility. It works great and I could easily save (with the .vcf extension) the vCard text with TextEdit (don't forget to disable Rich Text in the new document you create for this) and import the .vcf files into Address Book without a problem. Great tool that really helped me out.

Posted by The DJ at 06:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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