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While posting Generalized IPhone Contact Import, it occured to me that some iPhone owners may not have Microsoft Excel installed on their computer. Since Google’s free spreadsheet has the same file export capabilities as Excel, I thought it would be good to present another procedure for importing contacts to the iPhone.  Microsoft Excel isn’t used here.

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The import method presented here uses Google spreadsheet instead of Excel. The overall contact data flow is:

(1) Old Phone –> (2) plain file on your hard drive –>
(3) Google spreadsheet –> (4) CSV file on your hard drive –>
(5) Yahoo Address Book –> (6) Itunes/Iphone

There are lots of steps in this procedure some of which (step 5 below in particular) require manual copy/pasting of data. So, this method may not be worth the effort unless more than 20 or so contacts need to be moved. Also, since I’m not good with mobile phone SIM cards I don’t have specifics on moving contacts from SIM card to PC or Mac. However, I believe it can be done and have provided a Google search page for help.  March 17 Note: See Move Contacts – Rokker to iPhone – Part 1 for specific steps to copy names and numbers from a Motorola SIM card to the MAC or PC.

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The Google spreadsheet in step 4 contains three test contacts whose names are Jeff Z_Dilbert, Jim Z_Kirk, and Rick Z_Deckard.  The last name of these test contacts begin with the letter Z to make it easy to remove them from the iPhone. This means you can test the import process any number of times using Jeff, Jim, and Rick by performing steps 6 – 12.  Once things seem to be working okay, perform all 12 steps. 

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Follow these steps to import iPhone contacts:

1. Sign up for a Google account or use an existing account.
2. Sign up for a Yahoo account or use an existing account.
3. Export contacts from your old mobile phone to a file on your PC or Mac.  See this Google search page for pointers on how to do this.
4. Create a copy of the Google spreadsheet Yahoo_CSV_Import. Don’t change the column header names.  If Google Docs won’t allow you make a copy, send me a note and I’ll share the spreadsheet with you.
5. Manually copy and paste contact info from the file created in step 3 to the Yahoo_CSV_Import spreadsheet created in step 4.
6. Once all contacts are entered, save contact information from Yahoo_CSV_Import using comma separated values (CSV) format.  To do this select File->Export->CSV from the Google Spreadsheet menu. This copies contact data from the Google spreadsheet into a second browser window. 
7. Copy/paste contact data from the second window to a plain vanilla text editor like notepad or textpad and save to a folder on the local hard drive using any filename that ends in .csv. Make a note of the folder and the filename.
8. Login to your Yahoo account, go to the Address book by clicking the Contacts tab and select Import/Export. 
9. Go to the Import section and find a drop-down list box titled: “Choose a program to import contacts from:“. 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.  This file was created in step 7. Don’t be fooled by the word “Microsoft” in the name of the list box option. Files in CSV format can be loaded into products from any software vendor.
10. When the Excel CSV file from step 7 is located, Click Import Now. This should copy rows from the .csv file to your Yahoo address book. (Before doing this step, make sure the Yahoo account doesn’t contain outdated addresses)
11. Now, run ITunes and connect your IPhone to the computer.  Within Itunes, click the Info tab, find the Contacts section and locate the Sync Contact with: checkbox.  Click this checkbox, and then select Yahoo Address Book from the associated dropdown.  Click Configure and enter your Yahoo ID and Password. Then, Click the Sync button located in the lower right corner of the Info page. Re-enter your Yahoo ID and Password if prompted. The iPhone will sync in a few seconds.
12. With the iPhone still connected to the computer, and click the Phone icon and then click Contacts. Verify the iPhone contact list now contains names and phone numbers from the Yahoo_CSV_Import spreadsheet.

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