1. It is best to first transfer contacts to a google account, such as bensphonecontacts@
gmail.com. You can then very easily set your phone to sync with this account. Google accounts accept input as a .csv file. This process assumes that you are able to convert your old contacts data into .csv format.
2. Google will ONLY accept .csv files that are in google csv or outlook .csv format! It will not accept a file with slightly different field names or field names in the wrong order. To obtain this format, open your google account, type in a few contacts into google, and export the file as a google .csv document. Google .csv is a better format than outlook .csv
3. Then format your data using exactly the same field names and order as the google .csv document and import it into google. Unimportant fields may be left out.
4. If you have existing contact groups that you wish to import into google, you will first have to create those groups in your google account. Then rename every record in the group in your .csv file as follows: if your group name is “Family Friends”, then rename all records in this group with “* My Contacts ::: Family Friends”. Use the replace command to do this. Repeat for every group you have, and then import into google.
5. Field names are column names, if you need clarification.
6. More info: Google uses the ‘data pairs’ system to store phone numbers. This means that it uses two columns for each number, labelled “Phone 1 – Type” and “Phone 1 – Value”. The first stores the type of phone, which can be “Mobile”, “Home”, “Office”, or a few more values. The second column stores the number. This is better than the outlook format, which has many columns labelled Office Phone 1, Office Phone 2, and so on.