Gmail Contacts

Asides

Gmail can now import contacts from a variety of CSV sources but there doesn’t seem to be any way to export contacts. Don’t be greedy!

17 thoughts on “Gmail Contacts”

  2. I would actually really love a way to export contacts from Gmail. Right now I have to copy and paste, which is bunk…but I do like the new interface for contacts that they just introduced.

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  5. hello
    In gmail contacts . click all contacts . select all contacts .Click Compose a mail .Then copy all the addresses from the TO : field into a notepad and save as comma separated file 🙂 .
    This will do the thing
    Regards
    arun

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  7. Hi there.

    I was also having a problem exporting contacts out of gmail and found a long

    winded but effective solution.

    For this to work I used outlook 2003, excel and notepad.

    Using gmail
    1). Select “Contacts” button in gmail navigator.
    2). Select “ALL Contacts” button
    3). Select “ALL” button at the bottom
    4). Click on the “compose” button
    This will open up an email with all your contacts in the “To:” box.
    5). Copy these contacts into a new text document. (Just to be safe do this
    step).

    Using outlook
    6). Open outlook and goto “new” -> “distribution list”->”Select members”
    7). Now past the contacts into the box entitled “Add to distribution list”,
    then click okay.
    8). In outlook dialog box goto “File”->”Save As”. In the “Save as type:” box
    select “text only”. Now save the information into a location on your hard
    drive. You may now click on cancel and close the distribution list window as
    you no longer required the distribution list.

    Using excel
    9). Now open a new document in excel.
    10).Go to the option “data”->”import external data”->”Import data”. Now when
    the “text import wizard” dialog box opens, find the file that you saved as a
    text document.
    11). In the “original data type” box tick on delimited and on the “next”
    button at the bottom of the page and the next pages. Then click on “finished”
    Save the information in a “new worksheet”.
    12).In the excel worksheet delete the headings “members” and any other
    headings that do not pertain to your contacts.
    13). Rename 1st column “Names” and the 2nd column “Addresses”
    14). Then file ->”save as” ->”Save as type” look for the type “CSV (Comma
    delimited) (*.csv)”. Save the file in a known location on your hard drive.
    There will be a few warnings in excel about you losing formating information,
    but just accept by selecting the “ok” and “yes” buttons.

    Using outlook
    15) Go to outlook File ->”Import and export”->”Import from another program or
    file” -> “Comma separated values (windows)” -> “allow duplicates to be
    created”. In the “file to import” box, find the csv file you just created in
    excel.
    16). Select the folder that the new contacts will be placed into.
    17). Click in the next check box “the following actions will be performed”
    18). Click on “Map custom fields” if it doesn’t open automatically.
    19). Match the field in the left to an appropriate field in the right. This
    is done by draging the field from the left window onto the field in the right
    window. Then click “ok” and “finished”
    20). Find the new contacts, highlight them. Then goto “actions” -> “forward
    as v-card”. You will find that your v-cards have been created.

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  8. Well my Gmail contact has notes, phone number, etc columns.
    I can’t export it out as cvs file.
    I managed to copy/paste (first 100 characters per contact).
    The reason is obvious, it locks the user into one service.

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  9. I’m sure Gmail realizes that locking a user into one service will drive more users away than keep them roped in. Like Avin, I too have phone numbers, notes, and other assorted bits of info on my Gmail Contacts list, and I can’t remember which ones are updated on my machines. I also guess that Google figures they can get away with this for a while because they give POP access. If you use POP all the time, then you won’t really need to export from Gmail because when you access your mail from a POP client, you can add the info locally. I think that once Gmail moves out of Beta, we should see increased functionality on this front.

    My 2cents.
    Godspeed,

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  10. Ok,
    Here is my crack/fix.

    – Open contacts in Gmail.
    – Select All and click compose

    – Open Excel and paste them into first cell. (A1)
    -Now it will all be shown in one cell.
    -choose the cell and click DATA>TEXT to Colums
    -Choose Delimited
    -Next Choose ‘Comma’ as seperator (Make sure TAB is unchecked and actually all should be unchecked)
    -choose data format to be Text
    -Click finish

    It will error out if yo have a lot of contacts coz colum numbers are limited. That is fine, you may have to repeat the process for rest of the contacts…

    so you now may have about 200 contacts or less/more in each column.

    now select the row and click edit>copy

    click again on any row and choose edit>past special
    -choose transpose and click ok

    double click on right of colum a to fit the text, then enter “,” (without quotes) in colum b.
    copy it to all rows.

    now click file>save as>
    choose type to be csv and name the file and save it

    open in a text editor, you will see like

    haa@ww.com, “,”

    copy “,” (with quotes) and replace all with blank.

    so then you will see:
    haa@ww.com,

    save csv

    go to outlook and import csv.

    it will ask you what email adress should be in outlook, choose email.

    you are done.

    Reply

  11. So I’ve read about long winded ways of doing this, ways of only getting emails, etc. And I’m pretty sure I didn’t see what I’m about to suggest in the comments above. If I did, sorry… I exported all my contacts to gMail in preparation for an os reload (thank god for windows huh?) Then, Nero corrupted one of it’s own backups, and I lost my 7 gigs of music, 2 of pics, and all of my outlook email. That’s why I will never use Nero, and only use pop mail as a backup… But, whatever, here goes. To do this I used Digital Imaging for MS Office 2003, Excel/Word 2003, and finally… That’s it, theoretically. I think the Digital Imaging comes with Office 2003, but I may have a corp edition. Not really sure…

    1. Open you contacts folder so you can view all.
    2. Set the printing options to print in Landscape view. This way you get most (unfortunately not all, let’s say 95%) of any extra options you may or may not have loaded into Outlook.
    3. Once the file opens, run the Recongize Text with OCR function, and export to Word.
    4. After some minor table editing, you can come up with a working table that you can export to Excel.
    5. Make sure you set the CSV options, and, of course, the first row names (First Name, Last Name, B-Day, etc), save the file as a *.CSV file and you’re pretty much set.

    It doesn’t seem as easy to do now that I typed it out, but it went pretty quickly. I also needed to get my contacts out in a (realtive) hurry. Whatever, give it a shot if you have the time. If you don’t or it doesn’t work for you, sorry, my bad. I’ll try to answer anyone’s question, aight? Cheers!

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  13. I looked at the Gmail Export Utility, and its way too complicated. So complicated, it doesn’t make sense.

    This is the easiest way to export your contacts to a .csv file.

    Go to your contacts page in gmail. Usually, when it opens, the tab labeled “Frequently Mailed” is open. Click “All Contacts” instead.

    With your mouse, just simply highlight all the contacts, including the check boxes.

    Copy and paste them into a new Excel Spreadsheet. This should paste everything into three columns: one has check marks, one has the name of the contacts, the other has the email addresses.

    You cant delete the column with the checkmarks for some reason, at least not with Office XP. So, copy the columns with the names and addresses, and paste them into another new spreadsheet.(Has to be a new workbook).

    Now a .csv file, for gmail to understand it, has to have three columns. One labeled First Name, one labeled Last Name, and the other named Email Addresses. Right now, you only have two columns. Highlight Column B by clicking the B at the top of the column. Right click and press “insert”. This creates another column.

    Highlight Row 1, right-click and press “insert”. In A1, type “First Name”, A2 type “Last Name”, and A3 type “Email Address”.

    Now make sure all email addresses are in the far right column(Email Address), and the names are in the Far Left Column(First Name).

    Save as CSV(Comma Delimited) .csv

    You’re done!

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  17. So here we are over four years later and what do we have…export utility – check, import utility – check, ability to allow others to sync with contact data – ummm, NO!, ability to add a birthday in a contact and have it post to your calendar – NOPE! In four years Google has changed the UI for Contacts and added a Contacts Data API. Great! But, to my knowledge, there is still no easy way to sync the contact data in Google with any other service like Plaxo or device like the iPhone. They even built a calendar sync tool that talks to Outlook. Why does it seem like contacts are the red-headed step-child?? Hopefully they’re working on a kick-ass solution as I’m typing this, but I’ll be extremely disappointed if we get through another year using the same limited functionality that we have today. I also hope this doesn’t turn into an Android-only show, where if it’s not Android-based it’s not getting attention, since contacts get synced OTA with the new G1.

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