Transferring smartphone contacts to Excel – here’s how

To store and sort your smartphone contacts securely, you can transfer them to a clear Excel spreadsheet.

Transferring smartphone contacts to Excel: Here’s how

The contacts on your smartphone are probably data that you definitely don’t want to lose. To back them up, but also to sort them better, it therefore makes sense to transfer the contacts to a clear Excel spreadsheet.

• Before you can insert your contacts into Excel, you must first export them from your smartphone. Depending on the operating system, there are different methods.

• On Android, open the “Contacts” app on your Android phone and tap the three dots in the upper right corner. Select “Manage contacts” or “Settings” and then go to “Export contacts” or “Export to SD card”. Your contacts will be saved as a vcf (vCard) file, which you can then email to yourself or save to the cloud.

• For iPhone, open Settings and tap “Your Name ☻ iCloud”. Turn on the option for contacts. Go to a computer and sign in to iCloud.com with your Apple ID. Select “Contacts” and click the gear icon in the bottom left corner. Click “Export vCard” to save your contacts as a vcf file.

• After exporting the contacts, you need to transfer the vcf file to Excel. Excel cannot open.vcf files directly, but there is an easy way to convert the data into CSV format first.

• There are various free online services that can convert your vCard file into a CSV file, such as the website “convertio.co”.

• However, you can also do this manually for contact lists: Open the vcf file with a text editor such as Notepad and copy the relevant information. Insert this into a new Excel spreadsheet and separate the data using commas or tabs to divide it into different columns.

• Then open the CSV file in Excel by going to “File ☻ Open” in the program. Select the converted CSV file. Excel will automatically insert the data into separate columns. You can now edit the contacts further, sort them as you like or add additional data.

Further processing and synchronization options

Once your contacts have been imported into Excel, you can customize the spreadsheet to suit your needs.

• For example, move the columns around to display the data in the order that works best for you. Or use Excel’s filter and sort functions to filter by names, phone numbers, or email addresses.

• If you have imported contacts from different sources, you can find and delete duplicate entries in Excel.

• If you want to regularly synchronize your contacts between your smartphone and Excel in the future, many apps and tools offer direct integration between smartphone contacts and Excel. This is possible, for example, via Google Contacts or Microsoft Outlook.

• Using these tools, you can export contacts directly or synchronize them automatically without having to use vcf files.