Import Google Contacts to Nokia PC Suite

You would be forgiven to think that importing contacts from your Google address book into Nokia PC Suite would be an easy and straight forward task. Google Contacts has 3 export options: a proprietary Google CSV, a standard Outlook CSV and the vCard format. Likewise Nokia PC Suite allows importing Outlook CSV and vCard formats. Having recently tried both methods though, neither worked.

The Outlook CSV format failed with some error message and informed me that no contacts were imported. The error message gave no clue as to why. The vCard format on the other hand would import only a single contact.

After a little bit of digging around I found that the vCard .vcf file exported by Google Contacts is a composition of all your contacts, but Nokia PC Suite expects only one contact per .vcf file. A quick Google search reveled just the tool for this, vCardSplit. Using it is pretty simple: just dump your contacts.vcf file into a folder, say C:\temp, dump the vCardSplit.exe into the same folder, open a command prompt and type vCardSplit.exe contacts.vcf.

Back in Nokia PC Suite, go to Contacts and select import, then hold the shift-key and multiple-select all the .vcf contact files (Ctrl+A doesn't work because Nokia decided to snazzy up their interface and code their own file-select dialog). Click import and you should get all your contacts.

However, in my case I noticed none of the phone numbers showed up! Names and emails were there, but no numbers. The solution to this is to open up the contacts.vcf file you exported from Google and replace all instances of "VERSION=3.0" with "VERSION=2.1" and also replace all instances of "TYPE=" with "" (i.e. nothing). Then run the split tool again and import the contacts into Nokia PC Suite again. This time all info should come through (haven't done extensive checking, but all numbers and emails appear to be there, not sure about groups, titles and other details).