Thursday, April 5, 2012

I wrote a much longer post about how to change a text file into a vcard file but then deleted it. I spent about an hour doing this earlier this week and then more recently noticed that "do it yourself" blogs are much more appreciated. But the "how to" ended up being so long and indepth that if you've read about the vcard format and understand how to use Excel's concatenate, then it was 95% redundant. If you have a nack for scripting it was largely irrelevant. And if you don't like scripting or know what the vcard/concatenate are then it would likely be tedious and go over your head.

Other than putting together these basics, the reason it took me so long to make the vcard file is that apparently concatenate won't output line break formatting characters. So the only actual trick to the process is to use a special character string ($$$ works because not a lot of contact info includes dollar signs) for each line break, copy and paste (only the values) into MS Word, where Word's replace function can replace $$$ with ^p, which inserts the line breaks. Save as a txt file then rename to vcf. Done. These endless reformats of my cellphone will never leave me without contacts again!

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