Could Not Import Contacts Into G1 From CSV…

This is one of those blog posts that simply exist for the simple reason that if I run into this issue again I can find it later (and hopefully someone else will find it and it will help them too).

I recently got a new G1 and I exported my contacts into CSV from my old phone. The G1 syncs its contacts with the Google account that its linked to. You can log into the contact manager via Gmail (click on contacts on the left hand side). From there you can import a csv file. Their docs say something like this: We will import almost any csv file. The system will figure out the fields and place them into the appropriate area.

However, this isn’t quite true. If you try this, you’ll see that the names and email addresses come over fine, but the Phone field shows up in the “notes”. This isn’t so helpful on a G1. I cant use the notes field to SMS or call someone. After a few  hours of trying to figure out why my phone numbers were not coming over as “Phone” or “mobile” or anything. I found this post (which I’m copying and pasting the good stuff below just in case this help goes away) which outlines the reason. Read below to see how to fix this issue.

———————– Original Post—————————-

The list of fields are below at Note #1. But, in my experimentation to make this structure work, I found some strange and annoying quirks.
1) The two Description fields (Section 1 – Description, Section 2 – Description) must be populated with the word Personal (initial cap counts!) on each and every row if you want the data in the 10 fields that follow to be included in your Import. If you have no data in the Section 1 – Description field, then the data in that row following will not be imported AND the data in the fields following Section 2 – Description will be imported instead if the Section 2 – Description field is populated with Personal. If you put another word in, rather than Personal, the data will import, but each field in the row will be appended with that word. So, if you use the word Business, your data for the Google Contact for that row will be included, but renamed (i.e., (213) 555-1212 Business / mobile). As a result of this, when iPhone tries to upload this field, it will not be recognized as a phone number and will be left out or included in the Note section.
2) If you remove any fields (columns) from this format, the Google will only look for and populate: name, email addresses and notes.
3) Most contacts CSV formats separate First Name and Last Name. Not Google’s. You have to concatenate (just learned this function) the two fields into one, first. (See below Note B.)
4) If you are importing a lot of contacts (I have >2500), it takes Google a while to update the Contact Manager screen. Even though it says it’s done, there is nothing there. In my case, I figured 2500 was too much, so I tried importing again with a new CSV file with only 400 records. The import of the 400, five minutes later, was rejected because, it turns out, the 2500 were there all the time.
That’s what I learned so far. Good luck to everyone.
————————–
Note A:
Name, E-mail, Notes, Section 1 – Description, Section 1 – Email, Section 1 – IM, Section 1 – Phone, Section 1 – Mobile, Section 1 – Pager, Section 1 – Fax, Section 1 – Company, Section 1 – Title, Section 1 – Other, Section 1 – Address, Section 2 – Description, Section 2 – Email, Section 2 – IM, Section 2 – Phone, Section 2 – Mobile, Section 2 – Pager, Section 2 – Fax, Section 2 – Company, Section 2 – Title, Section 2 – Other, Section 2 – Address
Note B:
I found this on Dave Jeyes blog (http://theregoesdave.com/

2008/10/17/importing-contacts-into-gmail-guide-to-google-contact-csv-fields/)

Once you open the CSV file in Excel, you can write a formula to combine the first and last name then paste them into the correct column in this spreadsheet.

First create a column in your Outlook Export for the combined fields. Then write a function that looks something like this:

=CONCATENATE(F1, ” “, L1)

F1 should be whatever field the first name is in and L1 should be whatever field the last name is in. The part in the middle with a space between the question marks will add a space between the two. Then you can copy this field and paste it down the rest of the column to perform the same function on the rest of your contacts. Now copy this entire column and then right click on the column in my template under the Name column and select ‘Paste Special’ then ‘Values’ and it should automate it for you.

—————————End————————————-

Simply put, make sure you have Section 1 Description set properly and things will work out fine for you. They did for me once I populated this field.

Google should fix their help. I consider myself to be a fairly technical person, but this took way too much time. If my mother was doing this she’d be lost. Big UX fail there.