welcome back everyone my name is joel feld and today i want to discuss the topic
of importing and exporting your contacts let's go
you might be wondering why do i need to import or export contacts well there could be a variety
of reasons maybe you want to share contacts with someone else maybe you want to add contacts to a
different email service you might be moving from icloud to gmail from gmail to yahoo from yahoo to
aol from aol to outlook regardless when you import and export contacts it gives you the ability
to save your contacts from one location and put them in another location without having to retype
all of them i see this most when someone may have an apple id that's kind of shared amongst
family members and so they have a whole bunch of icloud contacts or they have a whole bunch of
gmail contacts and now they go off and create their own account but all of the contacts are over
here and they don't know how to get the contacts over here so importing and exporting contacts
let's uh let's dive in let's start on the mac if i go to contacts here we'll continue off with
the good old samson family and tech giants so in my icloud i have all of these contacts and
i have bart and homer and lisa and maggie and then i also have this tech giants group
which uh have microsoft uh apple google all of that but we're just gonna stick with the samsung
family because i actually have some information in there associated with those contacts so if
i go to all icloud i can export these contacts out in a variety of ways one of the easiest ways
honestly is just selecting all of the contacts i can select all of them
or i can go up to edit and choose select all and i could easily drag this to the desktop
and just like that those contacts are exported i could also go up to the file menu and do export
and export it as a vcard you also have an option to do a contact archive but honestly you'll
probably never use that because it puts it in a very specific format that other google outlook
is not going to be able to read the most common formats are vcard and csv for comma separated
value if i went up to file export did export vcard i could say others i'll just say all contacts
all contacts and you'll notice that once i click save here it's going to be
the same as this other option over here so really they're identical in the file format in all of
that so that's how we export them out if we wanted to import them in we just reverse the process if
i go to file i can choose import i can select all contacts or the bart samson one and if i do open
it's actually going to bring them in and it'll actually recognize duplicates it's going to say
hey there's duplicates here and i could say well let's review them
and it gives me the option to either keep the old keep the new keep both of them or update the old
one with the new information and if you ever have duplicates you can always go up to card and say
look for duplicates and it's going to analyze and say hey there's 11 duplicate cards and we
can actually merge them together and then i'm back to square one with those now the other option here
too is because i have my other accounts inside of the contacts here if we go up to contacts
choose accounts it's going to bring me over to system preferences and i can actually see that
i have contacts turned on for gmail contacts turn on for yahoo aol comcast no contacts so don't use
comcast it's just not a good email system but long story short i actually have these other contacts
associated with these accounts in my address book or in my contacts also but there's nothing in them
because i have contact selected under exchange which is microsoft i could drag this
in there and it's going to import and add these five contacts to this exchange account so if i
actually go out to safari and i go to my outlook here let's refresh these contacts will start
to show up because i just imported them and it's got to synchronize from the computer to microsoft
outlook so i refresh and here they are so now i have all of those contacts associated in there
now let's go over to google so i have my google contacts here and notice there's no contacts
here at all and if i go back to my contacts on my my computer if i go to google which is my gmail
notice there's no contacts here so i could drag this file into there but let's do it
a different way let's actually go out to google here and there's this import
contacts because i don't have any you'll also find import here on the left hand side and if
i click on import it's going to say hey let's to import contacts select a csv file or a vcard file
so i'm going to select the file because i have it on my desktop so i can go to my desktop to all
contacts say choose for upload and then import and now it's going to bring in those contacts
into my google ecosystem into my google account and they've just imported them all here google
has a really nice feature for finding duplicates also it'll say hey we just imported some new ones
you want to find the duplicates and it doesn't really find any because there's not any but
it is kind of nice so now if i go back to contacts here all of those contacts are now in google if i
go back to contacts on my mac it's going to take a moment for it to synchronize and then it will sync
from google.com from gmail and it's going to sync back down to my computer in the contacts app now
all along while we've been doing this if i go into the contacts on my phone or my ipad i can touch
groups in the top left let's uncheck icloud and now we just have all outlook selected so notice
here are those accounts just showing in outlook if i uncheck outlook i'm not going to see any
contacts because i'm not telling it to show any if i touch all gmail and there they are so they're
already showing up in my gmail if i touch all outlook i'm going to see them again and all icloud
it keep in mind it merges them together so for example if i touch bart here notice down at the
bottom linked contacts because it's saying hey this contact also exists in outlook it also exists
in icloud and gmail so that's why it actually doesn't show up as duplicates on my iphone or ipad
because it actually links them it's smart enough to do that but just know it's very important to
know where your contacts are at and this is a way to do that and if i were to uncheck all of these
and touch yahoo notice there's no contacts there because i haven't imported and i haven't created
any contacts in yahoo so if i wanted to do that we could go out to yahoo and or actually let's go
to google let's export out of google and it's as simple as going to export here and you get
it says what do you want to export do you want to export particular labels or groups or all my
contacts i'm going to say all and this is where it gives you options to either export as a google csv
an outlook csv or a vcard typically any of them will work it's gotten to the point where a lot
of these accounts are very universal and pretty friendly with the file type but we'll stick with
the google csv and see what happens so we're going to export that out and it goes into my downloads
so we're just going to drag that over here to my desktop and csv is nothing more than a spreadsheet
if i do a quick look at this it's really just a spreadsheet that has that information
associated with those contacts so now let's go to yahoo and we're going to go to contacts in
the top right here and there's three little dots here and we can say import from another account
and this is where it'll actually give me options to import it directly from another account here
so aol outlook gmail yahoo and so actually if i were to choose gmail it's going to prompt me to
log in with gmail and then it's going to send me a code so that i can verify that it's me so
i'll get a text message here we can type in that code 721 867 next and yep we'll allow
now it's going to import those contacts you know every account is slightly different i notice here
there's no option to actually upload a file it only links with an account so if i was purely
using icloud i would have a hard time getting my contacts into yahoo because they don't actually
offer an option for importing a file let's go back see all of these ads how i don't understand ah so
in yahoo here they are the contacts imported they linked it with google and now they're there let's
try aol here if i go to aol we'll go to inbox and down in the bottom left we can go to contacts
open full contacts and under full contacts we have an import and export option so we're going to do
import and notice here browse for file it wants a specific csv file so that vcard file most likely
won't work but let's go ahead and try it let's try it we'll do all contacts choose for upload
we'll do import and so notice no contacts came in because it really wants that csv file so if we go
back to more choose import we're going to choose that csv file choose for upload we'll do import
if you have aol or yahoo or any of those these advertisements on the right here that just are
terrible how do you how do you live with that i just don't understand all right so i tried both
importing into aol and it doesn't like any of the files so this is yet another reason don't use aol
just don't the last thing is is icloud if i go out to icloud here we can choose contacts and
here are those contacts so i have my groups on the left i have my tech giants and down here
in the bottom left we have this little gear that allows me to either import or export a v
card so it doesn't necessarily want a csv card or a csv file it wants those specific v cards
and this is where i could say import and it's going to prompt me to say okay where are we
importing from i'll do all contacts choose for upload bring those into my icloud account
and now they show up which it did create duplicates because icloud itself does not
recognize it but if i go back to contacts on my computer here go to all icloud notice they
are duplicated i can just go up to card say look for duplicates it's going to find the duplicates
and i can also merge cards that have the same name but contain different information
if i want to so i can say merge and then it's going to squeeze those back together
and now i'm back to square one so i have now my contacts in icloud i have my contacts in
outlook exchange i have my contacts in gmail i have my contacts in yahoo so that's pretty
much how you import export various reasons of why to import and exports contacts around from
one account to another and by doing that know that some accounts don't allow you to synchronize
between devices so if i go to system preferences on my computer and i go to internet accounts
notice some of these accounts don't allow me to synchronize certain information
for example comcast comcast only synchronizes mail and notes nothing else no calendars no contacts
nothing aol it gives me options for mail contacts calendars notes reminders but notice
gmail google does not do reminders it does mail contacts calendars and notes but no reminders
so some of these accounts allow you to synchronize some of them don't so just be aware that's another
reason why some people prefer to use gmail over aol or icloud over comcast and same thing
on the on your ipad or iphone if i go into the settings i can go under accounts and
i can actually see what these accounts are capable of syncing if i go to accounts here
i can look at icloud and if i go to icloud notice i can synchronize all of this different content
there's so much that icloud intertwines with because a lot of it is part of apple's ecosystem
if i go back to accounts and choose outlook notice i have mail contacts calendars and reminders
outlook doesn't do notes either look at that if i go to gmail i have mail contacts calendars and
notes if i go to yahoo yahoo does mail contacts calendars reminders of notes aol only does mail
and notes so if if i had all my contacts inside of aol i couldn't get them on my ipad or iphone very
easily because it doesn't synchronize with it if i go to comcast again mail notes but comcast doesn't
even work i spent like an hour trying to just get my old account on here not even worth it so just
don't use comcast so overall that is importing and exporting contacts in various different accounts
and how to move them between one place and another thank you so much for watching i hope you learned
something if you did hit that subscribe button tap that little bell and we'll see you next time