Convert a .vcf file to CSV or Excel

An online converter that runs on a server needs your file on that server. That is not a criticism of anyone's security, it is just what the words mean: to convert it there, they have to receive it there. For a holiday photo nobody minds. A .vcf exported from a phone is different. It is every person you know, their numbers, their home addresses and often their birthdays, in one plain text file.

This page converts nothing on a server, because it has no server side at all. The parser is served to your browser as an ordinary script and runs on your machine, the same way a spreadsheet program does. Put the machine in airplane mode before you drop the file and it still works, which is the simplest proof there is.

This is where most conversions fall over. A contact is not flat. It has several phone numbers, each with a label, an address made of five separate parts, more than one email, and a company that may also carry a department. Flatten that badly and you get one cell holding +40 21 555 0114, +40 21 555 0192, which no mail merge and no import can use.

• Every phone number gets its own column, and its own label column beside it. Three numbers means three pairs of columns, not one crowded cell.
• Addresses split into street, city, state, ZIP and country.
• Custom labels are kept as they were written. The middle number in the sample above is labelled darkroom, because that is what its owner called it.
• Every cell is written as text, so 030167 keeps its leading zero and a number starting with + is not read as arithmetic.
• Columns are added only when some contact needs them, so a book with no birthdays has no empty birthday column.

vCard 2.1, 3.0 and 4.0, which covers everything a phone, a mail client or a CRM exports today and most of what they exported fifteen years ago. Several files at once is fine: pick them together and they land in one table.

The awkward parts of the format are handled rather than ignored, because they are what breaks other converters:

• Quoted-printable text. Older phones write Sk=C3=B6ld instead of Sköld. Decoded, not passed through.
• Folded lines. The specification wraps long values onto the next line with a leading space. The note in the sample above is folded, and comes out as one sentence.
• Apple's separate labels. An iPhone writes the label of a number on its own line, tied to the number by an item1. prefix, and hides the common ones inside _$!<Mobile>!$_. Both are read.
• Contacts with no person. A company with no first or last name keeps its row.

Photos are ignored, because a spreadsheet has nowhere to put them.

Is there a limit on how many contacts?

No limit is imposed here. It is your own machine doing the work, so the ceiling is your browser's memory rather than somebody's upload cap. Files of several thousand contacts are ordinary.

Will Excel open the .xlsx directly?

Yes. It is a real workbook, not a CSV with the wrong extension, and it opens in Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets. The CSV is UTF-8 with the byte-order mark Excel wants, so accented names survive a double click on Windows.

Can I import the result into Google Contacts or Outlook?

You can, but both want their own column names, and this page writes readable headers rather than theirs. If you need a file that imports without renaming anything, that is what the iPhone app does.

Do you keep the file, or count what is in it?

Neither, and there is nothing to keep it with. The page counts visits with a cookieless counter and nothing else. Dropping a file, converting it and downloading the result send no event of any kind. The privacy page says exactly what is recorded.