Exporting your address book as CSV in Labels by Zaweba
Labels by Zaweba exports the whole address book, or one group, as a CSV file that Excel opens cleanly. Use it for backups and spreadsheets.
An address book you have spent years building deserves a copy somewhere else. CSV export in Labels by Zaweba writes your contacts out as a plain CSV file, either the whole address book or just the group you are looking at. It is the way to back them up, move them into a spreadsheet, or hand a mailing list to someone who uses different software.
The file is written as UTF-8 with a byte-order mark. That detail matters more than it sounds: it is what tells Excel to read accented names, the pound sign and other characters properly instead of turning them into strange symbols. You can open the file in Excel straight away and the names look as they should.
Whole book or one group
Groups in Labels are tags such as Christmas cards, Club members or Customers, and a contact can sit in as many as you like. The export follows the same idea. Export everything when you want a full backup. Filter to one group first when you only need part of the list, such as the members of a club committee or this year's card list, and export that.
Exporting a single group is often the more useful job day to day. A treasurer who wants the members list in a spreadsheet, or a friend helping with wedding invitations, doesn't need your whole address book, only the people in that group.
Making a backup
Your contacts live in a local file on your PC. Nothing is stored in the cloud, so a backup is your job, and CSV export makes it easy. Export the whole address book, give the file a name with the date in it, and keep it on a USB stick, an external drive or another computer.
A CSV backup has one big advantage over copying the app's own data file: almost any program can read it. If you ever change computer, or want to bring the list into another tool, a CSV is the most widely understood format there is. Labels itself can read it back with its CSV import, which matches header names generously and skips duplicates with the same name, company and postcode.
How often to export depends on how often the book changes. A household that adds a few addresses a year might export after the Christmas cards are done. A small business adding customers every week would do it more often.
Using the file in a spreadsheet
Open the CSV in Excel or another spreadsheet and each contact is a row, with columns for the fields Labels keeps: name, company, the three address lines, town, county, postcode, country, phone, email and notes. From there you can sort, count, check for missing postcodes or share the list with someone who needs it in a spreadsheet.
If you tidy the list in the spreadsheet, save it as CSV and import it back into Labels. Bear in mind that import skips duplicates, so contacts already in the book with the same name, company and postcode will not be added twice.
Moving to and from other address books
Labels has no direct vCard or Outlook import, and it doesn't write those formats either. CSV is the common ground. To bring contacts in from Outlook or another address book, export a CSV from that program first, then import it into Labels. To send your Labels contacts somewhere else, export a CSV and use the other program's own CSV import.
Keeping the file safe and correct
Don't edit the exported file in a plain text editor that saves in a different encoding, or the careful UTF-8 work is undone and accents may break when you import it back. Use a spreadsheet, or an editor that keeps UTF-8.
Remember that the export is a snapshot. Changes you make in Labels afterwards are not in the file, so export again when you want an up-to-date copy.
And keep the file somewhere sensible. A contact list holds people's addresses, phone numbers and emails, so treat the backup with the same care as the address book itself.
