Ledona Tech

I’ve been using Microsoft Office since the late 90s and have a ton of information in it that needs to be migrated. Email, tasks, calendar events, contacts and notes all need to be moved and preserved. There are a number of options for moving each content type to a Mac app.  In the end here are the things that I did.

1. Outlook Contacts to Mac Address Book

Export to text file (.csv) then import using the Mac Address Book import function. Unfortunately this will require some manual tweaking. You’ll have to make sure that the columns in the csv file match up with the address book contact properties. Once this is done let the import proceed. Once complete you may want to check your contacts to make sure that you got what you want.

2. Outlook Email to Thunderbird

This turned out to be the most daunting task for me because I have a very large email archive and wanted to preserve everything. I also wanted to use Thunderbird (I’m not a fan of Mac Mail, or Entourage). Unfortunately, at this time the Mac address book is not used by Thunderbird. However use of the address book is promised for Thunderbird 3.0 and there is a prebuild of Thunderbird 2.0 that has this feature somewhat enabled. Read more at http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=3003235 .

So all I needed to do was figure out how to get my mail from Outlook on PC, to Thunderbird on Mac. A little Googling turned up the follow http://guides.macrumors.com/Moving_Email_from_PC_Outlook_to_Apple_Mail . So all that is needed is to copy the entire profile folder from Thunderbird in Windows to Thunderbird in Mac. Additionally, make sure that the transfered profile folder is renamed so that it has the same name as the Mac Thunderbird profile folder that it is replacing, or modify the profiles.ini file in the Mac Thunderbird setup (located at ~/Libraries/Thunderbird/profiles.ini ) so that it includes the new profile. If you do the later you should end up with a profiles.ini file that looks something like the following.

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=0

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/1i0y50nd.default

[Profile1]
Name=outlook
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/5yd4og12.default

3. Outlook Events to iCal

Transferring events was pretty simple. The following tool when run will generate an iCal export file which can be directly imported into iCal.

http://www.mhsoftware.com/bin/iCalConvert.msi

4. Outlook Notes and Tasks to Eaglefiler

For my Outlook notes and tasks I tried a bunch of different options. In the end I wanted something simple that would allow me to easily view, modify and backup information. Additionally I wanted tagging functionality. Eaglefiler does all of that. It stores data in simple text files, so I can sync and modify the information on other platforms. It has integrated support for encrypted sparseimage files so I can have a higher level of security for some information. And it supports the tagging of notes for categorization and filtering. The only shortcoming is that from what I can tell it does not integrate with iCal (for due date, etc…).

To do the migration I simply exported my Outlook notes and tasks using the CSV export function built into Outlook. Then on the Mac side I opened up the CSV file and saved a separate text file for each entry. Lastly I imported the new text files into Eaglefiler.