iCloud is a great tool to have if you are a regular iOS or macOS user. This service backs up just about all of your most important information, including your contacts.
Recently, we took a look at how you can fix iCloud contacts not updating on your Mac. But what if you want to create a “hard copy” of your contacts and export contacts to excel?
Well, the process is actually much easier than one would expect. In fact, you can do so from either your iPhone or from your Mac without experiencing too many headaches.
Starting us off, we are going to take a look at how to export contacts to Excel from your iPhone. As iCloud does not make it easy to export contacts, you will first need to download an app.
The app that we found most useful was Contacts 2 XLS on the App Store. The app is completely free and makes the exporting process easy and painless.
After the app downloads, create an account. You can use your email address, Google account, or even Facebook to create the account.
From there, you will need to allow Contacts 2 XLS access to your contact list. This is just a permissions check that is built into iOS and is a prompt that you likely see on many new apps installed.
After you are granted access, the contact import into the Contacts 2 XLS application. Then, you are directed to the main screen within the app, where there are a few different options.
From the main screen, you can simply ‘Backup now’, manage your backups, or sign up for a subscription to automatically backup. This is an in-app purchase and costs $14.99 per year, but is not needed for our process.
If you want to export your contacts from your iPhone to excel, follow these steps:
Open Contacts 2 XLS
From the main screen, press Backup now
Once the backup completes, tap the Export icon in the bottom right
After you tap the Export button, you are provided with the share menu from iOS. Now, save the file in a myriad of applications, or you can save to the iOS Files app.
Obviously, you want to make sure that the exported file is sent somewhere that provides easy access. Think about sending it using the Notes app or even sent via an email to yourself.
Export Contacts to Excel from Mac
The process of exporting contacts to excel from your Mac is a bit more tedious than simply downloading an app. For this process, we will need to fire up your browser of choice and head over to iCloud.com.
Unfortunately, you cannot simply export your contacts to excel from here. Instead, you will be creating a “vCard”, which is Apple’s way of keeping your contacts in one place.
Here are the steps you need to take to create a vCard:
Open your preferred browser, navigate to iCloud.com, and log in
From the main panel, click on Contacts
Select a contact then press cmd + A
Tap the Gear icon in the bottom right-hand corner
Select Export vCard
All of your contacts will then appear in your Downloads folder on your Mac. From there, you will want to move this to a safe place, and likely rename the file to My Contacts or something similar.
However, as we stated above, this file can not easily be exported to Excel just yet. Instead, there are a few more steps we need to take.
Open your preferred browser and navigate to http://labs.brotherli.ch/vcfconvert/
Press Choose File and navigate to your newly created contacts list
Change these settings:
Format: choose CSV, choose Comma, and enable Add Header Line
Encoding: choose Unicode (UTF-8)
Filter: don’t change anything
Modifications: don’t change anything
Press convert
From there, it creates a new .csv file in your downloads folder. Again, think about changing the name of this file to something that you remember or put somewhere safe.
Once it creates this new file, make sure everything is working by opening it in either Excel or Apple Numbers. The contact list is properly sorted and organized by name while giving you all of the information you need.
Andrew is a freelance writer based on the East Coast of the US.
He has written for a variety of sites over the years, including iMore, Android Central, Phandroid, and a few others. Now, he spends his days working for an HVAC company, while moonlighting as a freelance writer at night.
The exported CSV file of iCloud Contacts is pretty useless as all the data fields for each contact are strung together in a single text sting in each row – NOT even separated by any delimiter!
WONDERFUL thank you for putting this all together ….I’m going to do it now.
Cheers
Thank you very clear. Now I can get my Christmas cards out!
Thank you for this Very helpful!
Worked like a charm from my MAC 🙂
Ty!
-Wil
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The exported CSV file of iCloud Contacts is pretty useless as all the data fields for each contact are strung together in a single text sting in each row – NOT even separated by any delimiter!