Spreadsheet to Contacts

From a flat list to a phone-ready file

A CSV list is flat: one row per person, one column per field, with RFC 4180 rules for the awkward cases. A field that contains a comma, a quote or a line break is wrapped in double quotes, and a double quote inside a field is written twice. A reader that splits every line at every comma will break on a name such as "Haddad, Amira" or an address with a comma in it, so this tool parses the CSV properly, character by character, tracking whether it is inside quotes, before it maps any column. Only after the parse does it ask which column is which, because a list exported from one system rarely uses the same headers as a list from another.

The output is vCard 3.0 (RFC 2426), the version with the widest import support across Google Contacts, iCloud, Outlook and Android phones. Each contact is one block: BEGIN:VCARD, VERSION:3.0, FN for the formatted name, N split into family and given names on the first space, TEL, EMAIL, ORG, TITLE and NOTE when the mapped columns have values, then END:VCARD. Under RFC 6350 (vCard 4.0), the only required properties are BEGIN, VERSION, FN and END, and this tool respects the same rule for 3.0: a contact with no phone and no email is still a valid card, as long as it has a name.