Moving from Mac back to PC.

They say once you go Mac, you never go back.  Well after 4 years of suffering the whims of Jobs, I had had enough and bought a new Lenovo Thinkpad W520 with Windows 7 pro.

Migrating from Mac to PC is harder than migrating from PC to mac.


Getting  Mac Address Book contacts into Outlook 2010.
Attempt 1.
 You can save your contacts as a group vcard in address book. This creates a single vcard with your thousands of contacts in.  However Outlook (unlike gmail) cant import a group vCard.  Microsoft could not spare a developer the half day it would take add it.  Dont forget to tick "include notes" in preferences->vCard.

Attempt 2.
  Hold down the option key, and drag all the Address book contacts into a folder. Now I have 1200 vCard files.  However, there is no way to import vCards into outlook 2010.  I could not believe this.  You can drag and drop cards into Outlook contacts, but it just displays them, it doesnt actually import them.  You would have to manually save all 1200, thats assuming your pc doesnt crash having that many vCards open at the same time.  I found this post with a VB macro to import the cards.  It would have taken a Microsoft developer minutes to add this functionality to Outlook.  Anyway, this almost worked, but failed for two critical reasons:

1. It only gets half the data. E.g. it doesnt get the urls, websites, it only gets one email if you have multiple etc.  Fail.
2. It files them as Lastname, Firstname, even though I have it set to file and display as firstname lastname in outlook contact options.  Fail.

Shoot the Microsoft Outlook programmer for me someone.

Attempt3
Step 1.
I created a brand new new gmail account.  I imported the group vVard from Mac Address Book,and got a number of import errors along the lines of "could not sync X contacts becaues they already existed in your contacts".  Hit details and make a note of the contacts which failed.  Now delete all your newly created contacts from gmail, and fix the contacts in Address Book (the problem for must of them is that I have several contacts with the same email).  Then repeat until you have a clean import with no errors.  Amazingly, google seems to take in every single field correctly from Address Book.

Step 2.
I deleted all the contacts from my mail gmail account which I use to sync my phone.  This was a mixture of the spam emails which gmail creates every time you send a mail + the contacts I managed to sync from Address Book using the flawed google sync option, and contacts I entered on my android phone (which are now lost).  Then I did an import of the group vCard from Address Book.  Then I synced my phone contacts, and presto - they all seem to be there.  It lost my link associations with facebook contacts, but thats not a problem. If I could start again, I would never setup facebook on android as it screws up your contacts with useless spam.
Now I will never use my gmail account to actually send an email, as it will create a contact spam item, which blocks any real contact.  There is no way to switch this feature off, unfortunately.

Outlook syncronizatoin.
Google do an app to sync outlook. However, its only for business users, and costs $5 a month for the rest of your life (which is about $2000 for me).  Thats too much just to sync my phone with outlook.  the iphone and windows phones come with this functionality free. 
I found this free Go Contact Sync Mod, which you just install, enter your google account details, give it a name and off it goes.  It works brilliantly!  It has two way sync with customisable conflict handling. The only issue I have found so far is that it cant handle multiple addresses with the same type.  E.g. in Address Book, some contacts have two Home addresses.  In outlook, only the second of the two shows up.  As I find more data issues, I'll let you know.

Getting iCal calendars into outlook.
This was achieved using the thankfully free google calendar sync.  The instructions are here.

Setting up a second PC with outlook
So having managed to setup my main machine with outlook contacts and calendars, the next task is to setup the travel laptop.  Amazingly, outlook 2010 has no way to save or export your account settings.  What are the Microsoft team playing at?  They have had more than 10 years to implement really simple features which would help their users so much.  So thats it, on your second machine you have to tediously create each email account by hand, entering all the settings such as stmpt servers, imap servers, ports, passwords etc. 
Then you can install Go Contact Sync Mod and google calendar sync and you are away, with almost no help from Microsoft but a lot of help from google.  Is Microsoft asleep?