CSV to vCard

Phone books are still built by hand far too often. A club secretary types forty members into a phone, an assistant copies a staff list into Outlook one contact at a time, an event organizer emails attendees a spreadsheet nobody can import. vCard is the standard every phone and address book understands. This tool turns each row of a spreadsheet into a contact card and gives you one file to import.

Matching columns to contact fields

Every column of your file is listed with a field chooser. Headers such as “First name”, “Surname”, “E-mail”, “Mobile”, “Company”, “Job title”, “Street”, “City”, “Zip” or “Notes” are recognized automatically, in many common spellings. Check the guesses, change any that are wrong, and set columns you do not want, like an internal ID, to “Skip”. The first value of each column is shown as a hint.

Several emails and phone numbers

Real lists often have Work email and Private email, or Mobile and Office phone. Map each to Email or Phone and all of them are kept. Words in the header become the type on the card: work, business or office give Work; home, private or personal give Home; mobile, cell or WhatsApp give Mobile; fax gives Fax. Phones then show the right labels next to each number.

Names

Map first and last name columns if you have them; the display name is built from them. A single full-name column works too. If none of the name fields is filled, the card is named after the company, email or phone number so it is never blank. Rows with no name, email or phone at all are skipped.

vCard 3.0 or 4.0

Version 3.0 is read by practically every phone, address book and email program, so it is the default. Version 4.0 is newer and stores phone numbers as tel: links; choose it only if a system asks for it. Commas, semicolons and line breaks inside values are escaped, and long lines are folded as the standard requires, so addresses and notes arrive intact.

One file or many

“One .vcf with all contacts” is what phones and address books import in one go. “One file per contact” produces a .zip with a card per person, named after them, which suits sending individual cards or tools that only accept single contacts.

Importing the file

iPhone: email or AirDrop the file to yourself and open it, or import it at iCloud.com › Contacts. Android: Contacts › Import from .vcf file. Google Contacts: Import on the left. Outlook: open the file, or use the People view’s import. Try with a small test file first if the destination is a shared address book.

Privacy

The list is converted in your browser. Phone numbers and addresses of your contacts are never uploaded.

Checking the cards

The preview shows the first cards as text, one line per field. Glance at names and numbers before downloading: a column mapped to the wrong field is easy to spot there.

Related tools

Standardize numbers first with Clean Phone Numbers so they dial correctly from abroad. Split a full-name column with Split Names. To go the other way, use vCard to CSV; for a single card as a scannable code, try the QR Code Generator.