Edit your contacts using Microsoft Excel and import them into Thunderbird
By Jin Nan Goto
In a previous post I went over exporting email contacts from a webmail account and importing them into Mozilla Thunderbird. However, what if you want to add extra contacts directly into the .csv (comma separated value) file that you exported? What if you have a list of contacts on an Microsoft Excel file that you would like to import into Thunderbird. Any spreadsheet program, such as outlook (but also openoffice.org and even Google Docs)will be able to read, edit, and save .csv files. I can easily open the contacts.csv file that I exported from Hotmail and edit it in Excel.
Then I can type in the new contacts. One limitation of Thunderbird is that they only import the first 36 or so fields of the csv and the Hotmail .csv file has a lot of unnecessary field. You need to make sure that you eliminate all but 36 of the fields.
If you have an Excel file (.xls) containing contacts that you would like to add to your Thunderbird Address book, No problem. Open the spreadsheet and click on “save as”. Then select CSV (Comma Delimited) as the document type and its ready to import into thunderbird.
Lastly, Whenever you are importing your .csv file make sure that all the fields in Thunderbirds Address Book match up with the fields that you are importing. You may need to move a couple fields up or down to match.
