Google contacts have made life incredibly easy because it makes it super easy to export your contacts to CSV. It gives you a rare opportunity to be able to edit your contacts directly in excel, thus giving room for you to make bulk changes to your contacts and this is way faster than manually editing them individually from Google’s interface.
On many occasions, we have been faced with tasks that involve exporting contacts from Google to a CSV file in many cases these tasks may include importing them into another address book or simply keeping a local backup for future use. This comprehensive article explains the easiest way to export your contacts. The process involves the following steps;
Step 1: Export your contact to google CSV. Below is a detailed instruction on how to do that
The first condition to be met is that you must make sure you are using the old version of Google contacts. If this is not met, kindly get this by clicking on the go to the old version on the left-hand bar. Now that you have the old version of google contacts. Locate the top bar and click on more and then export.
You have the liberty to decide whether or not you want to export part or all of the contacts. In a situation where you wish to export all the contacts in your address book. Choose all contacts and then either Google CSV, Outlook CSV or VCARD depending on the purpose. When you intend to save your file, just click on export.
Step 2: Import into excel
To do this you need to first open up a new excel spreadsheet. After which you would go to the “Data” tab and select “From Text”. Then select the CSV file you exported in step 1 of this article. When you have done this, choose “delimited” and press Next. Then choose “comma” and then press “Finish”. Then finally press “Ok”. Voila, you now have a spreadsheet with all your contacts on it.
Step 3: Edit in Excel
You’ll observe that excel will then import a whole host of columns up to around 160 which can be quite overwhelming but not to worry the most important ones would be obvious.
Name: when editing this column kindly put into consideration that someones first name is for the column that says given name7 and their surname should be entered into the column with family name7. When you enter this two important information the name field would be automatically calculated.
Email: this has two columns, one for type and the other for value which represents the actual email address
Phone: it has two fields just like the email
Address: this may have up to 9 fields
Organization [Work/Job/ Company]: These entries have 8 fields in total
Step 4: Export to CSV
Now that you have edited in excel you can export back to CSV format without stress. Just click on the File and Save As and choose “CSV (comma delimited)” type. You would most likely see a warning, go ahead and click on YES. In a case where you see a second warning just click on OK again.
Step 5: Import your new CSV
Now you can import your new CSV file back into Google contacts, just go to More and import and choose the file.
Step 6: Merge
After importing your newly edited contacts you now have double copies of each contact in Gmail. Feel free to merge them by going to More and then find and merge duplicates.
