After my office moved to a new location, I had to change about 30 addresses, work phone, and fax numbers. Instead of doing it one at a time, I pondered how to do this efficiently and came up with the following ... if you are an isync user, you may want to run a sync just before starting this as an added layer of defense. Here's how I did it:
- Create a group and put the contacts in that group (this makes organizing and viewing only them easier later). Then select all of the contacts in your new group and drag them to the desktop to create a single Vcard file of all of them.
- Duplicate this vcard file, and delete all of the contacts in the new group (you want to delete them, not remove them from the group).
- Open the duplicate vcard file in your favorite text editior, my selection was TextEdit, and find and replace the strings that you want to change.
- When you've got it right, drag the edited vcard file back onto the group, and it will add the contacts back into Address Book with the changes.
If everything goes haywire, you can always drag the original vcard file onto the group to get back to where you started. For me, there was no problem, and I have pictures embedded into most of my contacts. They came back in as well.