We’ve recently done a few articles on migrating from certain e-mail services over to GMail, and they’ve been well received. Some of you have asked for a way to export GMail contacts into other services or applications, like Outlook or Entourage, and being the helpful monkeys we are, we thought we’d comply. The process is pretty simple, but does require a little bit of work, so let’s get started.

As we’ve discussed in previous articles, GMail uses the CSV file format to import contacts. Most e-mail services and applications also support this file format, so we’ll be creating a new CSV file out of our GMail contacts for export. The simplest way to create a CSV file is using a spreadsheet application like Excel. If you do not have Excel, check out Gnumeric a completely free, open source spreadsheet application. Furthermore, you could use a simple text editor to do this.

1. Open Excel (or whatever spreadsheet application you use) and create a new document.
2. You will first need to name each column. Name the first one First Name, the second Last Name, and the last Email Address. Many applications support other fields as well such as address and phone number, but we’ll just use these for simplicity’s sake.
3. Now you can manually input the fields for each contact if you wish, or you can copy and paste directly from GMail. If you wish to follow this last method, go to your account, click on Contacts, then scroll down and click All then Compose. When the new e-mail opens, just copy all the names in the To: section.
4. Once you’ve inputted all the information, go to File -> Save As and save the file in CSV format, naming it something like contacts.csv. You can then import this file into whatever application you use. Enjoy!

As you can see, exporting your contacts isn’t very difficult to do, but it is a little tedious. E-mail Google and request an export feature!

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