Exporting Gmail contacts
You can quickly export your Gmail Contacts list into a CSV file. Here's how:
Sign in to Gmail.
Click Gmail at the top-left corner of your Gmail page, then choose Contacts.
From the More drop-down menu, select Export....
Choose whether to export all contacts or only one group.
Select the format in which you'd like to export your contacts' information. Please note, some of these formats can lose some contact information.To transfer contacts between Google accounts, use the Google CSV format. This is the recommended way to back up your Google Contacts.
To transfer contacts to Outlook, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, or various other apps, use the Outlook CSV format.
To transfer contacts to Apple Address Book, use the vCard format.
Click Export.
Choose Save to Disk then click OK.
Select a location to save your file, and click OK.
Depending on the requirements of the program to which you're exporting your contacts from Gmail, you can easily edit the file to fit your needs.
Mar 29, 2013
Importing CSV files
To import contacts to Gmail:
- Create a custom CSV file, or export the address book from your other webmail provider or email client as a CSV file.
- Sign in to Gmail.
- Click Gmail at the top-left corner of your Gmail page, then choose Contacts.
- From the More actions dropdown menu, select Import....
- Click the Choose File button.
- Select the file you'd like to upload and click the Import button.
When it's done, Gmail will display the number of contacts imported. If you receive any error messages during the import, you might need to
edit your CSV file. Note: These CSV files work with Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Eudora, and some other email providers. But the CSV files that these applications produce might not contain all of the supported contact fields. For example, when Outlook exports to a CSV file, it omits data including attachments, distribution lists, contact pictures, the "file as" field, the "nickname" field, and text formatting in the "notes" field. Google Contacts doesn’t have a way to know what was omitted, so we suggest that you manually copy over any important information in these fields after you import your contacts.
About the notes field:
- Google Contacts doesn't support rich text formatting, or unlimited length in the “notes” field. When we're unable to import a certain field from the CSV, we do our best to let you know so that you can fix it manually.
- The maximum size for a contact is 128 KB. If a contact exceeds this size, the "notes" field might be truncated.
