The easiest way to get your Apple Address Book contacts into an Excel spreadsheet is actually by using Entourage as a go-between. Here’s how.

1. Back up your Apple Address Book. (Just in case.) To do that, under the File menu, choose Export and then choose Address Book Archive. Save the archive to the desktop so it’s easy to find in case you need it.

2. Now you want to export your Address Book contacts to a vCard file. If you want to export a few hundred people, you can do them all at once. If you have a thousand or more, you should do it in chunks. So: highlight the Address Book contacts you want to export. Then under the File menu, choose Export and then choose Export vCards. Name the file something you’ll remember, and save it to a place where you can find it again (like the desktop).

3. Open up Entourage and click on Address Book (may be an icon at top left of page). Then take the vCard file you exported from Apple Address Book, and drag and drop it into the Entourage window. Entourage should automatically import all the info. Do this process multiple times, if you have multiple vCard files.

4. In Entourage, under the File menu, choose Export. In the box that pops up, click “Contacts to a list (tab-delimited text)”.  It will export the entire address book to a tab-delimited file.

5. Take that file exported from Entourage and drop it on top of the Excel icon in your Dock, or on top of the Excel application in your Applications folder. Excel should open your tab-delimited file in a spreadsheet. Under the File menu, choose “Save as” and then save it as an XLS file.