VCF to CSV Converter

Contacts live comfortably in a phone or an email account, but there are many jobs an address book cannot do. Sending invitations through a mailing service, cleaning up duplicates before a move to a new phone, sharing a client list with a colleague or importing customers into a CRM all start with a spreadsheet, and most of those services ask for a CSV file.

The export they give you is a vCard instead. A .vcf file stores each contact as a block of labeled lines, which is easy for address books and awkward for everything else: open one in Excel and you get a single column of text. Converting it to CSV lays the same data out as a table, with one contact per row and one field per column.

The conversion is also a good moment to tidy up. In a spreadsheet you can sort contacts by surname, spot the same person saved three times, fill in missing company names and delete numbers nobody has called in years, which is slow work on a phone screen. When you are done, the cleaned list can go back into an address book.

The header row names each column after the vCard field it came from: name parts, organization, job title, phone numbers, email addresses, postal address, birthday, website and notes. When a contact has more than one number or address, each gets its own column, labeled by type where the vCard gives one, such as home, work or mobile. Contacts with fewer details leave the extra cells empty.

Photos and custom ringtones are left out, because a CSV can only hold text. Everything else stays as written, including names in any script, so the file is a faithful copy of the address book in table form.

A contacts file is personal data, so treat the CSV with the same care as the phone it came from. It is deleted from our server 30 minutes after conversion, but the copy you download is yours to protect; avoid leaving it in shared folders.

vCard began in the 1990s with the Versit Consortium and passed to the IETF, which maintains it as an internet standard. Because it is a standard, every major address book reads and writes it, but each one fills it in a little differently: Google adds group labels, Apple adds its own field names, and older phones use the 2.1 version with different character encoding.

The converter reads all three versions and handles the encoded characters older phones use for accented names, so you do not need to know which one your file is. The settings below cover the few choices that are left.

Most people can convert with the defaults and open the result. If the CSV is going into a particular service, check its import instructions first; some expect a semicolon instead of a comma, or a specific encoding. Each option is under Advanced settings, and they apply to every file in the batch. For a workbook instead of a CSV, see CSV to XLSX; JSON, XML and other formats are in the Data Converter page.