Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I save all my contacts as VCards?

— ET

Hey, ET. You know, we have to tell you the truth: after nearly 800 Hey, Scripting Guy! articles the Scripting Guy who writes this column is beginning to get a little burnt-out. Fortunately, the Scripting Editor has often volunteered to do the column for him, and the Scripting Guy who writes this column has decided to take her up on that generous offer. Therefore, and without any further adieu, let’s turn today’s Hey, Scripting Guy! over to the Scripting Editor:

OK, thank you, Scripting Editor. That helped; the Scripting Guy who writes this column suddenly feels much better and much more refreshed now. In fact, we’ll tell you what: why don’t you finish doing whatever Scripting Editors do, and we’ll show ET how to – um, yes, we get it, although we don’t believe the real ET was actually a Martian. Anyway, why don’t you go do whatever it is you do and we’ll show ET a script that can save all his contacts as VCards:

On Error Resume Next

Const olFolderContacts = 10
Const olVCard = 6
Set objOutlook = CreateObject(“Outlook.Application”)
Set objNamespace = objOutlook.GetNamespace(“MAPI”)
Set colContacts = objNamespace.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderContacts).Items
For Each objContact In colContacts
    strName = objContact.FirstName & objContact.LastName
    strPath = “C:\Test\” & strName & “.vcf”
    objContact.SaveAs strpath, olVCard
Next

As you can see, ET, the script – sorry; just a second. Yes, those shoes are darling, just darling. And they look totally awesome with that sweater.

Totally.

Anyway, as we were saying, the script starts out by implementing the On Error Resume Next statement. Whenever we work with contacts we’re prone to getting somewhat-inexplicable errors from time-to-time, errors that, to be honest, don’t make a lot of sense to us; for example, the script might fail, complaining that a valid contact property (like FirstName) isn’t a valid property after all. We’re not sure if this is a generic problem or if it just has something to do with our copy of Outlook; however, tossing in the On Error Resume Next statement seems to take care of the problem, so we did that here just as a precaution.

Our first real bit of coding is to define a pair of constants: olFolderContacts, which tells the script which Outlook folder we want to work with; and olVCard, which tells the script the file format to use when saving the contact information. After defining the constants we create an instance of the Outlook.Application object, then use the following line of code to bind to the MAPI namespace (a required step, even though the MAPI namespace is the only namespace we can bind to):

Set objNamespace = objOutlook.GetNamespace(“MAPI”)

Once we’ve successfully connected to Outlook we can then use the following line of code and the GetDefaultFolder method to retrieve a collection of all the items found in the Contacts folder:

Set colContacts = objNamespace.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderContacts).Items

That was, like, way easy, you know?

Sorry; we couldn’t resist.

Actually, that was way easy and, best of all, the rest of the script is just as easy. Our next chore is to set up a For Each loop to loop through the collection of contacts. As everyone knows – well, OK, as most people know – VCard is just another file format; consequently, that means that we can’t save contact information as a VCard unless we specify the complete file path for this new file. We decided to create a file name based on the contact’s first name and last name; thus we use this line of code to assign the values of the FirstName and LastName properties to a variable christened strName:

strName = objContact.FirstName & objContact.LastName

If we have a contact named Ken Myer that’s going to result in a file name that looks like this:

KenMyer

Once we have a unique file name we can then construct the complete path:

strPath = “C:\Test\” & strName & “.vcf”

Nothing too fancy here: we’re just combing the folder path C:\Test\ with the value of the variable strName and .vcf, which represents the file extension (because VCards use a .VCF file extension). From there we go ahead and create a VCard for our first contact, something we do by calling the SaveAs method, passing the file path (the variable strPath) and the constant olVCard as the two method parameters:

objContact.SaveAs strpath, olVCard

After that we loop around and repeat the process with the next contact in the collection. When all is said and done the folder C:\Test should include a bunch of files similar to these:

KenMyer.vcf
JonathanHaas.vcf
PilarAckerman.vcf

That should do it, ET. And now we’ll let the Scripting Editor have the final word on today’s column:

Thank you, Scripting Editor; we couldn’t have said it better ourselves.