Exporting Hotmail Contacts - OpenOffice Calc

[James McDonald]

I was trying to export my wifes free hotmail account contacts out.

They are clever I will give them that. There is no facility to export 
the contacts to csv etc. The hotmail display of contacts does a semi 
random obsfucation (replacing some of the last few characters in the 
email address with `...') to stop you simply copying them off the web page.

I had to copy the lot into oocalc and then manually complete each email 
address.

I noticed oocalc doesn't have a native text to column feature (oowriter 
does). I always use this feature in excel so I had to download and 
install a plugin from the OpenOffice Macro Add-in site 
http://www.ooomacros.org/user.php which is quite handy for adding 
functionality that isn't in the core distribution.
 
A difference I found comparing Excel with OpenOffice is that the Formula 
argument separator is `;' while Excel uses `,' so I had a few head 
scratching moments while I re-read my formulas and got the syntax right.

So now all I need to learn is how to Automate OpenOffice and I will be 
able to leave m$ licensing alone forever.