Converting Entourage Contacts to Bento or FileMaker

We recently received the following question: “Can I export my entourage contacts, calendar, and notes into Bento?”

Answer: Entourage is the old contact and calendar application that shipped with versions of Microsoft Office for the Mac prior to version 2011 where they now include a Mac version of Microsoft Outlook. Since Entourage is no longer actively supported by Microsoft, getting your information out of it and into another format that will be supported going forward is importation. It’s unlikely that you can easily transfer calendars and notes…but you can get your contacts from Entourage into Bento. Here’s how:

1. Open Entourage.
2. From the File menu, choose Export…
3. Click on “Contacts to a list (tab-delimited text)
4. Click on the Next arrow.
5. Enter a name like FILENAME.txt for the export file and click on Save.
6. Open the Mac OS X Address book.
7. From the File menu, choose Import…
8. Click on the FILENAME.txt file you exported from Entourage.
9. Map all the correct fields to where you’d like them to be imported in Address Book.
10. Click on OK.

This works because contacts in the Mac OS X Address book are shared with Bento.

You can also use this Entourage contact export file you created to directly import contacts into FileMaker. Just drag the FILENAME.txt file on top of the FileMaker icon and follow the prompts to create a new database with your exported information from Entourage.