Google Hacks, 2nd Edition

Import Your Contacts into Gmail

Data entry’s a drag. Export your contacts from an existing web mail service, desktop email application, or database, and import them into your Gmail address book.

Possibly the most annoying aspect of moving into any new web mail home is bringing all your family, friends, and business contacts along with you. The average end user has almost been trained not to expect any sort of import utility, instead sighing and settling in for an evening of data entry.

Gmail, as with most post-1990s web mail applications worth their salt, provides the facility for importing all those contacts in just a few clicks; just how many depends on where you’re exporting them from. Gmail accepts only one format: comma-separated values (CSV). Thankfully, CSV is about as low a common denominator as you could wish for; Yahoo! Address Book, Outlook, Outlook Express, Mac OS X Address Book (with a little help from a free application), Excel, and many other applications, web or otherwise, speak CSV.

Tip

Gmail’s Help documentation on the subject of importing contacts is sure to keep up with the needs of its users, so keep an eye on “How do I import addresses into my Contacts list?” (http://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=8301).

Anatomy of a Contacts CSV

First, a quick tour of a typical contacts CSV file as consumed by Gmail’s import tool.

CSV files, as the name suggests, are little more than garden-variety text files in which data is listed one record per line, each field ...