Importing and exporting contacts to and from Contact Manager

Contact Manager allows users to import/export contacts. It is often needed to copy or move contact records between applications. You can transfer (import) address book of your mail client to be used in Contact Manager. On the other hand you may export your contacts stored in Contact Manager into a file to be used in another program.

Importing from a file
Your contact list can be imported to Contact Manager in a form of a file, saved in CSV format. In a CSV file each new line is a collection of contact details separated by a character (tab, coma, semicolon, etc). You can use your text editor (e.g. Notepad) to add contacts to a file or an application with a tabular view (e.g. Microsoft Excel). A contact line can include as many details as you need to import. Here is the sample of contacts.csv file:

Creating a CSV file
There are several points to keep in minds when creating a CSV contacts file:

• Contact details are added in the same order for every contact line (i.e. Name, Last Name, Nickname, etc.)
• When omitting a detail, place and extra separator to indicate a missing field (e.g. Maria, , , mary@none.none – two extra commas are added to replace Last Name and Nickname fields) 
• Use the same separator throughout the file

Field correspondence
To import your CSV file to Contact Manager, you need to specify field correspondence; i.e. for every field name in your file assign a field from Contact Manage Contact Entry Form. For example if you assigned your file’s Name field to Contact Manager’s Nickname field, then all contact details stored under Name in your file, will be placed in Nickname field in Contact Manager. The picture below shows an example of a field correspondence:

By default Contact Manager assumes that the first line in your file contains names of fields (i.e. Name, Last Name, Nickname, etc). If for any reason you did not place field names on the top of your file, don’t go back to modify your file. Just enable “Import first line” option – this will force Contact Manager to treat the first line as contact details rather than field names.

Imported contacts appear in the indicated folder in Contact Manager:

Importing from Outlook Express or Bat!
Contact Manager allows you to import your contact books stored in Microsoft Outlook Express and Bat!. Just like with file import described above, importing Outlook Express or Bat! contact book is done via CSV file. However, in the later case a CSV file is created by the application itself (by exporting its address book into a file). There is no need to specify field correspondence manually, since it is already known to Contact Manager. Just select the corresponding template (Outlook Express or Bat!) during the import step and your contact book will be added to Contact Manager.  

Exporting from Contact Manager
You can export any number of contacts from a Contact Manager folder into a CSV file, which can be opened in another application. During export operation in Contact Manager indicate fields of the Contact Entry form to export and a field separator. The details corresponding to the indicated fields, separated by the indicated delimiter, will be exported to a file, which you can download on your local computer.