Transfer patients from Mac Contacts into Cliniko

Export patients from Mac Contacts and import them into Cliniko.

Emily avatar
Written by Emily
Updated over a week ago

Exporting data from Mac Contacts

If you've been keeping a list of all your patients' contact details on your shiny rose gold MacBook 💻,  you can export them, and then import them right into Cliniko! Here's how to get started with that.

This process will require you to use a spreadsheet program. Because it's Mac-based, this tutorial will focus on exporting contacts with Numbers (Apple's spreadsheet program).


First, open the Numbers app.

Launch the Numbers app on your computer:

From Numbers, add a new document:

Select Blank, and then press the Choose button:

This is the first part of the process. You'll now have a blank spreadsheet that looks something like this:

On to the next step!


Next, get your contacts.

Unless you've already set up "groups", your Mac will have all your contacts in one list. If you haven't created a specific group for patients, you'll need to manually check which people are patients, and which aren't.

Launch the Contacts app on your computer:

From your list of contacts, find your patients:

At this point, you'll have to manually "drag and drop" each patient into the spreadsheet we'd opened earlier. Here's a video of the process:

When it's all done, you'll have a list of your contacts in the spreadsheet:

Now, head to File → Export to CSV:

Make sure that the text encoding is set to Unicode (UTF-8). This ensures compatibility with Cliniko:

Select Next, then give it a name. Press Export:

This should export the file to the downloads directory on your computer! Now you can take that file and import it into Cliniko


Unfortunately, beyond this guide, Cliniko cannot help with this initial step of getting the data. Once you have it, we can help with importing it, but we won't be able to get the data from your Mac for you.

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