CSV to vCard

Why CSV to vCard needs a column map

A CSV says only that values sit in rows and columns. It does not say whether a heading called Number means a mobile phone, an office line, an account number or something else entirely. A vCard does say. Its phone, email, name and address fields have defined meanings, and phone and email values may carry labels such as home, work and cell.

That is why this converter shows its plan before it gives you a file. Familiar headings get useful suggestions, but each suggestion remains a visible select you can change. Nothing is silently inferred from the values. If your sheet calls the family name Surname, the suggestion handles it; if your business uses Client, you decide what that means.

CSV and vCard, in brief

CSV

Full name	Comma-Separated Values
Extension	.csv
Format type	Plain text table, one record per line
MIME type	text/csv

VCF

Full name	vCard
Extension	.vcf, .vcard
Format type	Plain text contact cards, RFC 6350
MIME type	text/vcard

One row becomes one contact

The header row names the source columns and every useful row underneath becomes one BEGIN:VCARD block. All of those blocks go into a single .vcf file, which is the normal way to move an address book. Empty rows are counted and left out rather than becoming blank entries. A row with only a phone number or email is still useful and is retained; the value also becomes its display label when no name exists.

Names can arrive assembled or in separate first, middle and last-name columns. Separate parts remain separate in the structured N field, while the readable FN field is built from them. An explicit full-name column wins when you have one. The converter never tries to split a full name by spaces, because particles, double family names and different writing orders make that guess destructive.

The output is vCard 3.0, UTF-8, and folded by bytes

Version 3.0 is widely understood by phone and desktop address books while still representing the fields a practical CSV can supply. The downloaded file uses UTF-8, so names such as Zoë, Åström and 李 remain intact. Commas, semicolons, backslashes and line breaks are escaped as the format requires. Long content lines are folded at 75 UTF-8 octets rather than 75 JavaScript characters, so a multibyte letter or emoji is never cut in half. Physical lines use CRLF endings for strict importers.

This page intentionally does not invent contact photos, custom Apple labels, phonetic names or synchronization identifiers from columns that do not contain them. Those are real vCard features, but pretending a generic spreadsheet describes them would make the file look more complete while making it less truthful.

Check the result before importing it

The raw preview is not decoration: it shows the actual grammar that will be downloaded. Look at a few FN, TEL, EMAIL and ADR lines before taking the file. If the direction you need is reversed, VCF to CSV reads an exported phonebook and returns spreadsheet rows. To inspect an existing contact file without importing it, use the VCF file viewer instead.

Your contacts never become an upload

Many search results for this conversion ask for the spreadsheet to be uploaded. That is an unusually poor bargain for an address book: it contains other people's mobile numbers, home addresses, birthdays and private notes. Here the CSV parser, mapping and file writer all run inside this tab. There is no conversion endpoint and no account. The local-processing guide shows how to verify that claim yourself with the browser's Network panel.