Migrating Contacts/Events from PC to Mac

So I recently bought a 17" Powerbook G4 and it has become my main computer. I'm an iPackrat so I wanted to move my 5 years of email, contacts and calendar events from Outlook XP for Windows to Apple Mail, Address Book and iCal for Mac. I will be posting about the process it was to move my email but for now I'd like to post about the contact and events migration. The contact and events migration was relatively painless but it took a few man-hours of searching to find this simple solution. The basic overview of the final solution was, I emailed the contacts and events to my Powerbook as vCard and iCalendar files, respectively.

To send Outlook contacts as *.vcf (vCard) files:

1. Goto the Contacts folder


2. Select all of the contacts


3. From the Actions menu choose, "Forward as vCard"


4. In the resulting email, choose "Plain Text" as the email format. This prevents a problem where the attachments aren't readable by the Mac because they are lumped together in a file called winmail.dat.


5. Add a subject and send the email to an account you check from the Mac


6. Get the email on the Mac


7. Open Address Book and drag & drop the vcf files from the body of the email to Address Book.

To send Outlook calendar events as *.ics (iCalendar) files:

1. Goto the Calendar folder


2. Goto the View menu and select Current View -->By Category, so you can see all of your events in a list.


3. Select all of the events


4. From the Actions menu choose, "Forward as iCalendar"


5. In the resulting email, choose "Plain Text" as the email format. This prevents a problem where the attachments aren't readable by the Mac because they are lumped together in a file called winmail.dat.


6. Add a subject and send the email to an account you check from the Mac


7. Get the email on the Mac


8. Open iCal and drag & drop the ics files from the body of the email to iCal.