Lessons in life Ticket#200712071116: Importing vCards (.vcf) into outlook

I have Outlook 2003 on my Vista Business at work. And it's a pain to import my contacts via vCards in vcf format into it.

I did some research and a lot of people have a lot of opinions on how to go about importing multiple contacts. There's a plugin for Outlook made by some company, but that's gonna cost.

Anyway, here's my problem. I had a list of .vcf files I'd backed up from my N80 mobile. Dragging all of them into Outlook warrants a disaster, in which appears one pop-up for every vCard I had. Not very elegant.

So how did I get my way around this? I made use of .csv that's how! The drawback is that not all the data is directly reusable but it's a start.
- Go to Command Prompt and type in "copy *.vcf somename.csv" to merge all the files (in one folder)
- Open up in a text editor capable of search and replace on linebreaks (I used NoteTab)
- Type the first line in as the header fields you want to have (based on your Outlook fields) for example:
"Name","Home Phone","Mobile Phone"
- Search and replace the unnecessary stuff throughout the files with minor tweaks here and there
- Make sure every field is double-quotes-enclosed
- Save the csv file

Now you can load in the file to Outlook!
- Go to Outlook > File menu > Import and Export...
- Select Import from another program or file (and click Next)
- Select Comma Separated Values (Windows) (and click Next)
- Locate the csv file you've just created for File to import
- Choose your options (I prefer to Do not import duplicate items)
- Select your contacts
- Click Map Custom Fields and do your thing there, checking that the mappings are correct, then click OK
- Click Finish and you are done!

The above is probably useful if your vCards only have phone number information and not much else besides their names. Anything more will be too much of a hassle on the text manipulation part.