CentralStationCRM help
All Categories Import and Export How to import your contacts via Excel or vCard

How to import your contacts via Excel or vCard

On the overview page you can find the tab Contacts and select Import datain the right column. If you only want to import companies you can find the same option on the overview page Companies.

Import-CRM.png

When switching from another CRM provider you normally get a file in CSV or Excel format, this you can easily upload it here and import. If you have a CSV or xlsx file, please save it first as an Excel 97-2004 file (.xls). Make sure that all rows formatted in Excel as text because they might be formatted as a date or formula (i.e. phone numbers with a plus in the country code).

vCard files can be created by e-mail applications such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail, as well as various websites like Xing, LinkedIn, Gmail and Google Contacts. If you have both file formats to choose from you should go for vCard files, since they can be easily imported without further action from your side. With Excel files there is an intermediate step necessary as you must assign the fields in CentralStationCRM.

Import-excel-vcard-crm.png

Import vCards (vCard)

If you have selected the vCard import, it starts right after you selected the source file and press the import button. It is important here only to use people contacts. Pure Company vCards, as they can be generated for example from Apple Mail, are not supported. The format should be .vcf,  (not as sometimes created by Outlook, .msg for "messenger" file).

Import from Excel or CSV files

If you have chosen the XLS import, you should now check and if necessary adjust the assignment of fields. Based on the column name we try to assign the fields already and give you suggestions. Please note that the last name of a person is a mandatory field for the import of people.

If the person is also assigned to a company in your file, it is also applied directly. When importing companies only the company's name is a required field.

After you have assigned all fields and pressed the import button you will receive a short note in your CentralStationCRM when the import is complete. In addition we will send you an email with details on the import.

Tips for importing tags for grouping and segmentation

If preferred you can add tags and keywords already with the import. Just use the fields "People Tags" and "Company Tags". If you want to use more than three columns for the import of tags, you can do this with the Excel function CONCATENATE. This can write entries from multiple columns into one. Inside one cell we can import as many tags as needed as long as they are separated by commas. 

This could be the concatenate function: = CONCATENATE (T2; ","; V2; ","; Z2) writes the entries from the cells T2, V2 and Z2 in a cell

Was this article helpful?

Thanks for your feedback!