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This post describes a general method to import IPhone contacts.  To use it, you’ll need Microsoft Excel, and a Yahoo account and you’ll need to copy your contacts into Microsoft excel to get things started. A Yahoo account for free just for signing up. 

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Excel isn’t free, but it is widely used. If you don’t have access you Excel, you could use a plain text editor like Textpad. Another option is to use the free spreadsheet provided by Google Docs which supports saving in CSV format.   See the bottom of this post for more on Google Docs or see Part II for another import process which is “Microsoft Office free” because it uses Google spreadsheet instead of Excel. Also, See “Move Contacts – Rokker to iPhone” for a post describing how to move contacts from your old cell phone to your PC without manually copy/pasting.

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The general idea for contact import presented here is: 1. Move your contacts from Excel.csv to Yahoo contacts, 2.  move contacts to Apple Itunes, and 3. synch to the IPhone.  So the flow is Excel.csv–> Yahoo Contact Import –> Iphone Yahoo Sync.

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A word of caution before using this procedure. To avoid moving unwanted or outdated contacts onto the IPhone, be sure the list of names and numbers in Yahoo Contacts contains only those contacts you want to see on your IPhone.  I ran this procedure without first cleaning up my Yahoo contact list and ended up with lots and lots of old contacts moved to the IPhone.  If you create a new Yahoo account specifically to import contacts from a spreadsheet to the IPhone, you shouldn’t have this problem.

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As a first step, load your contacts into a Yahoo compatible Excel.csv file. You can download a sample Excel.csv file from [here]. After downloading the sample Excel.csv file, save it to your hard drive. Be carefull not to change values in row 1 of the spreadsheet. This row contains header values that are used during the import to Yahoo. The minimum data values (or columns) to be loaded into the .csv file are “first name”, “last name”, and “cell phone number”. Remaining fields can be blank.

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After the Excel.csv file is populated, Login to your Yahoo account, go to the Address book, and select Import/Export.  Go to the Import section and find the “Choose a program to import contacts from:“; it’s a drop-down list box. Select Microsoft Outlook (.CSV) File from the drop down and then use the Browse button to specify the location of the Excel CSV file containing your contact information.

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When the Excel CSV file is located, Click Import Now. This should copy rows from the .csv file to your Yahoo address book.

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Now, run ITunes and connect your IPhone to your computer.  In Itunes, click the Info tab and locate the Sync Contact with: checkbox.  Check this checkbox, and then select Yahoo Address Book from the associated dropdown.  Then, Click the Sync button located in the lower right corner of the Info page. Enter your Yahoo ID and Password if prompted. The IPhone will sync in a few seconds.

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Leave the IPhone connected to the computer, and click the Phone icon and then click Contacts.

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As a final step, use your IPhone to verify it’s contact list now contains names and phone numbers from the Microsoft CSV file. If so, you should be good to go.  If any part of this procedure doesn’t work as described, send a note to tony@core3.com.

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Related Posts:
vCard to CSV Converter

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Feb 16, 2008 – Instead of Excel or Textpad as the starting point for contact import, another option is to use the spreadsheet function of Google Docs.  For instance, here’s the Yahoo_CSV_Import spreadsheet with column headers matching those expected by Yahoo’s contact import. To save the spreadsheet in CSV formation, select File->Export->CSV (shown below) which moves the spreadsheet into a second browser window. Then copy/paste from the second window  to a text editor (notepad or textpad) and save to the local hard drive using any filename that ends in .csv. From this point, contacts can be imported into Yahoo’s address book in preparation for synching with the IPhone.

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March 18, 2006 – See Move Contacts – Rokker to iPhone – Part 1 for steps to export names and numbers from the SIM card of your old cell phone using a SIM reader from Dekart.  SIM data is written to a file on your PC or Mac in preparation for synching with iTunes and the iPhone.