You probably find yourself in a situation where you need to know how to export contacts from Gmail to Excel either to have a backup of all your contacts, edit them to add more relevant information or import them to another account in either Gmail or Outlook. In this article we are going to explain what you need to do so that you can save all the information of your contacts stored in Google in an Excel table in a few simple and quick steps.
On the web we can find many articles that try to talk about this topic, but they are actually aimed at exporting Gmail contacts to a CSV format file without explaining much. Now, many times we need to edit, delete or add new phone numbers and using an Excel sheet will make this task much easier.
How to Backup and Export Gmail Contacts
In case you didn’t know, Gmail backs up all the contacts we have on our devices for a period of the last 30 days. However, backing up your contacts will allow you to access them at any time. It is a method to keep our contact information more secure.
Follow these steps to download an Excel backup:
- Sign in to the Gmail page, then sign in to the account you want to back up.
- Select Google Contacts from the product menu or go to contacts.google.com.
- Once inside we proceed to make the selection of the contacts we want to export, this can be done manually to select more personality to select those contacts we want to save.
- Locate the Export option in the menu on the left.
- Select between selected Contacts or if you want to export all of them ignore step 3 because at this point you can select the Contacts option to select all of them.
- Select Google CSV or Outlook CSV.
- Then the download will start and the backup will be ready.
How to create an Excel contacts format
The file you will provide is designed to aggregate in a single column all the contact information separated by commas (,). If we want to be able to read our contacts in a faster and easier way, we will have to make some modifications so that it adapts better to what we are looking for. First of all, we must select all the column where all the information is located and we go to the Data section and click on Text in columns.
Editing it is very simple, we only have to select “delimited values” and then in the next step choose the comma (,) as the separator of the values. We just have to click on accept and finish so that our contacts begin to be displayed in a more orderly way showing each of the details in columns with their proper name to identify them.