Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you?
I hope spectacular.
We’re going to go to a little quick demo for you today based on a viewer email.
If you have questions for me about technology and it makes a great demo, I’ll do this.
I’ll create a little video based on your letter.
Rosalyne, thank you because you asked me a great question that a lot of people have.
She set up a new Gmail account and Rosalyne says, “Could you tell me if it’s possible
to add all my contacts to my Gmail to my address book and if so, how do I go about doing this?”
I like that question because it is not always self evident how to move contacts from one
address book to another.
In fact, quite often for a lot of people the thought of moving their address book is terrifying
so they actually stay using an address book system or email system that they really don’t
like using because they’re afraid of migrating all of their contacts out of that into a new
address book.
It’s not all that difficult.
I would say it would maybe be a 4 out of 10 on a technical scale, depending on what address
book you’re going from and going to.
In this case, we’re going to Google Contacts which I think is a great way to go because
it’s so universal.
So moving your contacts into Google Contacts, big thumbs up on that.
Now you didn’t tell me what you’re coming from so I’m going to walk you through a
couple of different scenarios.
The first is if you happen to be in the Apple world and you happen to be unfortunate enough
to have used Apple’s contacts for many years.
I know I shouldn’t bash Apple but I don’t like their built-in productivity tools.
I don’t like their contacts, I don’t like their calendar and I don’t like their email
software.
I find them all limiting and the fact that they’re given away for free and included
with the operating system means that Apple has never really applied themselves to these
tools the way that they’ve applied themselves to the rest of the stuff they sell to us.
So I wish they’d apply themselves a little bit better and make them better.
Okay, off the soapbox, Steve, and onto how to export it.
With Apple’s address book and with a lot of address books, with all of them actually,
you just go under the File Menu, find Export and that will tell you immediately what your
options as far as exporting your contacts into another file are.
Apple’s very limited.
You can create an archive, which is a backup, or you can export them as a vCard format which
is a virtual business card format which is actually quite useful.
But Apple’s leaving out one big thing.
You can’t export them as a CSV or a comma-separated value file, essentially a spreadsheet file.
You can’t export it into a spreadsheet which is too bad because if you want to clean up
and you want to work and massage the data, in a spreadsheet is the best way to do that.
So it’s a limitation of Apple’s address book.
You’ll have to take a look at your own address book and figure out what your options are
for exporting it.
But if you can export it to vCard format, that’s your best bet because it will import
very cleanly into Google Contacts.
Now the challenge is if it doesn’t support vCard format and we have to export as a CSV
or we’ve got our email addresses already on a spreadsheet of they’re coming from
a mail list that we’ve gathered, maybe addresses are coming from a different place other than
an address book.
Then we need to make sure that we map the data correctly against Google’s format within
their address book.
I’m going to show you what I mean.
Let’s pretend that we’ve exported these vCards as a vCard format and it’s really
easy to then import them into Google Contacts.
We just navigate to Google Contacts in our browser.
There we go under the More menu and we choose Import, very limited but covering off pretty
much everything you need.
It says right here you can select a CSV, comma-separated value spreadsheet, or a vCard and upload it.
So all I would do is I would navigate to that file, choose import and every time I’ve
done this with vCards, it’s been absolutely clean and pristine and everything is mapped
correctly.
Now this business of mapping correctly is something that you really need to understand
because there are a lot of different data fields that Google has within their contacts.
Those are actual physical kind of locations within the field.
vCard will map against those accurately but if you’ve got a CSV file, you have to then
mirror that mapping in your CSV file before you import it because if it’s Row 3 and
you’ve got email address in Row 3 but Row 3 in Google Contacts is asking for street
address, well, you’ve got a problem because your email addresses are all going to go in
the street address field and things aren’t going to sort and they’re not going to work
properly.
That’s the issue we face.
But there’s a fairly easy workaround.
It’s just kind of a two-step process.
Here it is.
I’m going to walk you through it and you will be amazed at how simple it is.
What I do is I take a blank file out of Gmail.
I’m going to select a file and in this case here this is just an empty demo record.
I choose that and I export it into the format that I want.
I’m going to export it as a Google CVS format.
So I’m going to export it.
What this is going to give me is it’s going to give me a template.
It’s going to give me a little spreadsheet file.
Take a look at it when I open it.
This is kind of magic.
When I open it up, it opens up with all of the different fields listed out across the
very top of the spreadsheet so that all I have to do to copy records into it is in my
spreadsheet if I’ve got First Name in my spreadsheet right there, I’ve got First
Name, Last Name, so I just select all of my First Names from my spreadsheet—I’ll just
select a few of them there—I just copy them and if I paste them into the Given Name field
right there, they are all going to line up perfectly.
Then I do their Family Name and I go on.
All I have to do is I look at these major headings and make sure that I’m copying
the data into the correct field.
Actually, there are a few that confuse me, I got to admit.
As I was reading through, take a look at this one here.
It’s called Yomi Name.
I didn’t know what a Yomi name was.
I had to look it up.
Do you know what a Yomi name is?
I didn’t think so.
A Yomi name is the phonetic representation of a Chinese name because it’s written with
different characters.
It’s the phonetic representation so they’re recognizing the fact that this is not the
real spelling because that would involve characters as opposed to letter.
There we go.
We live and learn.
Anyway, we look along here, we find the email address, we import the email address, we import
the street address, we import the phone number, we do all of that.
Then once this is all said and done, we go back into our Contact Manager here within
Google Contacts, we choose Import, we navigate our way through to the file that we’ve just
saved that was the template but we’ve now copied all the information into, we go Import
and then we navigate our way through that and it will import your records accurately
and correctly.
It’s the best way that I know of to import records from another address book or a spreadsheet
into Google Contacts.
I hope you found this to be useful.
If you have other questions for me, please drop me an email.
There is contact information on our website and I will do my best to answer all the questions
from you because that’s what I’m all about, answering the questions.
I hope you found this useful.
Please, subscribe to our channel and don’t forget to give us a Like if you liked the
video.
I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.