How to convert a CSV file to VCF to transfer contacts

Contacts apps, good ones, make it easy to import or export contacts from other apps, services, and devices. They normally do this via CSV or VCF files. VCF files are the more commonly used format when it comes to importing or exporting contacts. CSV is less common. If you have a CSV file with contacts stored in it, and you need to convert it to VCF before it can be imported to a device or service, you can use Google Contacts.

Google Contacts is one of those services that supports both CSV and VCF files for importing and exporting contacts. It can be used as an intermediary to convert a CSV file to VCF.

Prepare CSV file

Make sure the CSV file has the correct headers for Google Contacts to read. if you’re not sure which headers you need, open Google Contacts and create a dummy contact. Use the export option to export it as a CSV file.

Open the CSV file and take note of the headers that have been used. Make sure your own CSV file has the same headers.

CSV to VCF

Visit Google Contacts and click the More button. Select the Import option and from the dialog box that opens, select the CSV file that you want to convert to VCF.

Once the file has been imported, and all the contacts show up in Google Contacts, select them all. You can use the selection box at the top to select them all with one click. Click the More button and select Export. This time, select the VCF format to export the file.

You can use Google Contacts to convert a CSV file to VCF, or vice versa. For VCF files though, it may be a bit tricky making sure they’re properly formatted. If you’ve created a VCF file yourself and it doesn’t import in Google Contacts, consider using the same trick with the CSV file to figure out what the correct format is.

It’s also worth mentioning that while Google Contacts will reliably convert files to CSV or VCF, whichever you choose, without losing any information, the app or service that you import or export it to must support all contact fields that are in the file. If the app doesn’t support a particular field, the information simply being there will not help.

It is possible that information from some fields is displayed in a different one just so that you can access it.