import contacts csv file into windows 8 people app

how to import contacts csv file into windows 8 people app

PERFECT!! This works and was easy when I finally found it!  Should be on the tutorial.

I was as frustrated as others on this list, but I finally figured it out.  I was having the same problem as others that everything in my contact info file from Outlook 2013 was loading into People except for the most important part - the email addresses.

I decided to export my listings from People to a csv file so that I could see what the column headings were.  It turned out that in the People files, the email address columns use "E-mail address" (i.e. hyphenating the word email) and in the csv file that I had exported from Outlook 2013, the email address columns use "Email address" (i.e. no hyphen in the word email).  The other column headings seemed to match between the two programs.

I opened my Outlook 2013 csv file in Excel and changed the headings to add the hyphens wherever the word "email" appeared in a column heading, saved the file and then imported it into People and it worked!  The email addresses came through at last!

I should mention that I had already cleaned up my Outlook csv file to remove all hyphens from the phone numbers (I just opened the csv file in Excel and used Find All and Replace All to replace all of the hyphens with blanks.)  So maybe I had accidentally removed the hyphens from the word E-mail in the column headings when I did that.  I also had to remove all the + signs that were in some of my phone numbers for international calls.  It seems like Microsoft should find a way to allow those in phone numbers.

It took me several hours to figure all of this out.  It does seem like Microsoft should figure out a way to make this process a little easier.

Can you please provide us some actual help on this? Not only we cannot import our contacts from windows mail win7 straight to win8 people, even the procedure you suggest imports only the names but all the fields inside are empty.

i have gone through these steps probably 20 times, every freaking time i get a new error. its been 2 hours and I am seriously giving up on WP8. I made a CSV file. when I import it i get a new error that I cant solve!!!! here it is:  There was a problem importing your contacts.

Phone numbers and websites can only contain English characters (a-z or A-Z), numbers (0-9), and specific symbols (such as @). Please try again.

a multi-billion dollar software company and here were are, got to go through every freaking contact and find a character that doesnt fit .