Thursday, December 25, 2008

Howto create custom csv file to upload into gmail contacts

I recently got the T-Mobile G1 phone and wanted to transfer my contacts from my old phone to the G1. The G1 syncs its contacts with gmail contacts, so I added them there. How I pulled my contacts from my old Motorola E815 phone into a CSV is a tale for another blog, but it was painful. Gmail has a page: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=12119 that's supposed to specify how to create a csv file suitable for upload to gmail, but I found it useless because it didn't clearly define the set of acceptable field names. In the end what worked for me was to first export a contact from gmail into a csv file in Outlook format. The first line of that file has all of the field names. I found that the gmail importer was robust to reordering of the field names and omitting field names. It looks like there isn't an easy way to merge these contacts uploaded with email contact entries that already exist.

For the record, here are the field names for Outlook's CSV format that gmail understands:

Name,E-mail Address,Notes,E-mail 2 Address,E-mail 3 Address,Mobile Phone,Pager,Company,Job Title,Home Phone,Home Phone 2,Home Fax,Home Address,Business Phone,Business Phone 2,Business Fax,Business Address,Other Phone,Other Fax,Other Address

9 comments:

  1. Thank you VERY much for this post! I've been struggling for over an hour before I googled your solution. It has been very helpful.

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  2. Thanks.
    And why this info was not in Gmail's "How to create custom CSV file" we'll never know...

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  3. Some refinement:

    1/ Name the columns in your spreadsheet to exactly match the Outlook CSV values.
    2/ Put the entire address in one field
    3/ Any other fields you name will be saved in the notes field in this example format: "FieldName: field_value"

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  4. Is this info still valid, I changed my csv fields and still not luck..

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  5. Thanks a bunch for this!

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  6. Thanks so much! I'm importing contacts from my beloved old EccoPro personal information manager and this allowed me to make a .csv file that worked just great.

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  7. Thank you very very much Sir/ Ma'am, I've been trying to do this successfully but could not do it. Can't thank you enough :-)

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  8. Thanks helpful and objective, god bless u

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  9. Really very nicely compiled and explained... Thanks a lot...

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