Contact list

Contact lists, also known as address books, contain people's information in a delimited text file. They can be opened in a text editor or a spreadsheet program like Excel, Numbers, Sheets, LibreOffice, or Lotus 1-2-3 to verify its contents.

How to get it

Contact lists can often be downloaded or exported from various cloud services (email, VoIP, ...) and apps (Google Contacts, Outlook, ...). Some instructions are provided here for common sources:

Google Contacts

  1. Go to contacts.google.com.

  2. Click the export icon at the top-right side of your contact list.

  3. Click Export.

Google Takeout
Be advised

Contact list files exported from Google Takeout have been reported to be incomplete. Use vCard when possible instead.

  1. Go to takeout.google.com.

  2. Under Create a new export, click Deselect all.

  3. Scroll down and check the box by Contacts.

  4. The default format will be vCard (which is advised), but if you want a CSV contact list, click vCard format and choose CSV in the list, then hit OK to confirm.

  5. Scroll all the way down and click Next step, then Create export.

Expected format

Contact list files must have one of these file extensions:

  • .csv
  • .tsv

The field delimiter must be one of:

  • , (comma)
  •     (tab)
  • ; (semicolon)

The first row must be the header row with field/column names, and the first few rows must have the same number of columns.

Specific fieldsets are recognized for popular services/apps:

  • Google Contacts

But in general, supported fields include:

  • Full name
  • First name
  • Last name
  • Birthday
  • Phone number
  • Email address
  • Gender
  • Picture (can be either a URL or the base64-encoded picture bytes)

along with some variations for each field name (e.g. Birthday could be Birthdate, Date of birth, DOB, etc.).