How to Export iPhone or Android Contacts to Excel — Without Uploading Them

It is always two steps

Every phone and contacts service exports to the same format: vCard, a file ending in .vcf. It holds every contact with all their fields, and every phone, email program and contacts app can import it. Spreadsheets cannot — open one in Excel and you get a single column of lines like TEL;type=CELL:010-….

So the route is: export a .vcf from wherever your contacts live, then convert it into a sheet with one contact per row and one field per column. The first step depends on your phone; the second is the same for everyone.

Get a .vcf from an iPhone or iCloud

• On the iPhone (iOS 16 or later): open Contacts, tap Lists at the top left, touch and hold the list you want — All Contacts, or one account such as All iCloud — and choose Export. Save the file or send it to yourself.
• On a computer, through iCloud: sign in at iCloud.com, open Contacts, select every contact (Ctrl+A or Cmd+A), and choose Export vCard from the menu. This is the easiest route for a large address book.
• On a Mac: open Contacts, select the contacts, and choose File › Export › Export vCard.

Get a .vcf from Android, Samsung or Google

• Google Contacts app: open Fix & manage, choose Export to file, pick the account, and save the .vcf.
• Samsung Galaxy: open Contacts, tap the menu, then Manage contacts › Import or export contacts › Export, and choose where to save it.
• On a computer: at contacts.google.com, choose Export and pick vCard. (Google also offers its own CSV formats; the vCard keeps every field and every label.)

Turn the .vcf into Excel

1. Open the VCF to Excel converter in any browser — on the phone itself or on a computer.
2. Drop the .vcf file onto it. Several files are combined into one list.
3. Check the list: search it, and review anything flagged as a possible duplicate.
4. Click Excel (.xlsx). You get one row per contact and a column for every field in use — name parts, each phone number under its label (Mobile, Home, Work, or your own custom labels), emails, addresses, company, job title, birthday, notes.

Contact photos are not put in the sheet, but you can save them all as image files with one click, each named after its contact.

Garbled names and missing zeros

Two problems account for most failed contact exports:

• Names like =ED=99=8D or ÇѱÛ. Android writes vCard 2.1, which encodes every non-English character as an equals sign and two hex digits. Older phones save the whole file in a legacy Korean or Japanese character set without saying so. The converter decodes the first and detects the second, the same way the garbled-CSV fix works.
• Phone numbers that lose their 0 or +. When Excel opens a CSV it decides a column of digits is numeric, and 010-… or +82… loses its start. The .xlsx file stores phone numbers as text, so they stay exactly as they were. If you need a CSV, import it with Data › From Text/CSV and set the phone columns to Text.

Duplicates after combining phones

Moving from Android to iPhone, or syncing Google and iCloud, tends to leave the same person in the list twice. Drop both exports together and the converter flags contacts that share a phone number or an email address — comparing numbers on their final digits, so +82 10-1234-5678 and 010-1234-5678 count as the same. It flags; it does not merge, because only you know which entry to keep. Sort the sheet by name and tidy them there.

Why not to upload an address book

Your contacts are a list of other people's personal details, and most online converters work by uploading the file to their server. You cannot see what happens to it there. A browser-based converter never has the file to keep: the work happens on your device. That is how PDFGami works, and you do not have to take it on trust — the safety checklist shows how to check any tool in a minute.

Frequently asked questions