My Opera
Importing a CSV file of contacts into Google Contacts
Tuesday, February 2, 2010 11:11:54 AM
I use Google Contacts to keep a backup of the data on my phone. Today I needed to also import some contacts from a CSV file that our telephone contact list at work produced.
Google has documentation on this feature here:
Creating or editing a CSV file
However, that page does not mention what the accepted list of column/field names that they recognise are and which contact fields they will be mapped to. For example, a column named "Firstname" will not be matched to the First Name field of a contact. You have to call the column "First." Unmatched columns get posted into the "Notes" field for that contact.
Here is what I found out works after some experimentation.
Contact Field -> Correct Column Name in CSV file
First Name -> First
Last Name -> Last
Phone (Mobile) -> Mobile
Phone (Home) -> Home
Birthday -> Birthday
There are probably many more, but these were the ones I needed to get me going!
Update 7/2/2010:
A friend told me that another approach is to create one contact in Google Contacts and then export it as a CSV file. This gives you all of the headings that Google would use by default for each field. You can reformat your own CSV file to match that and import it.
Google has documentation on this feature here:
Creating or editing a CSV file
However, that page does not mention what the accepted list of column/field names that they recognise are and which contact fields they will be mapped to. For example, a column named "Firstname" will not be matched to the First Name field of a contact. You have to call the column "First." Unmatched columns get posted into the "Notes" field for that contact.
Here is what I found out works after some experimentation.
Contact Field -> Correct Column Name in CSV file
First Name -> First
Last Name -> Last
Phone (Mobile) -> Mobile
Phone (Home) -> Home
Birthday -> Birthday
There are probably many more, but these were the ones I needed to get me going!
Update 7/2/2010:
A friend told me that another approach is to create one contact in Google Contacts and then export it as a CSV file. This gives you all of the headings that Google would use by default for each field. You can reformat your own CSV file to match that and import it.
