Importing Data into Google Contacts

I bought a T-mobile Mytouch, released in early August. It's a great phone, and since it's an android phone, it's natural to want everything working with gmail, google calendar, and google contacts. For years I'd been using Ecco Pro as my contact manager and calendar. I switched to Google calendar a few years ago, and I decided it was now time to move my contact data from Ecco to Google.

You can import appropriately formatted contact information into Google contacts. The problem is figuring out the appropriate format. You can export from contacts to see what google produces, but if you try to put your information in that format and it fails to import, you have only a cryptic error message. For some reason my attempts to mimic Google's format didn't work and I was stuck with trial and error.

In the hope that it will be helpful to someone else, here is a CSV format that works. First, the fields (the following is all one line):

Name,Family Name,Given Name,Phone 1 – Value,Phone 1 – Type,Phone 2 – Value,Phone 2 – Type,Phone 3 – Value,Phone 3 – Type,Phone 4 – Value,Phone 4 – Type,Phone 5 – Value,Phone 5 – Type,E-mail 1 – Value,Organization 1 – Name,Address 1 – Formatted,Address 2 – Formatted,Notes

The sample data looks like this (again, this is all one line):

John Smith,Smith,John,12345,Work,12345,Home,12345,Work Fax,12345,Mobile,12345,New Type,joe@joe.com,Joe's bar and grill,123 any st Anytown IL 01234,Company address 456 any St. anytown IL ,"Put notes in quotes. This way, you can use commas. Can you ""double delimit?"" Yes."

This will create a record with 5 phone numbers (one of type "new type") and notes including quotes. I hope this example helps someone attempting a bulk import of contact information.