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Creating the Addressbook CSV File and Importing it into Webmail
Continued from Preparing the Data for Restructuring
In Microsoft Excel, we can save any file in CSV format, although formulas, multiple sheets and other features of the spreadsheet will be lost. But, when dealing with text data, a Comma Separated Values file can mean that you can import the data into something else.
We're going to use that feature of Excel to save the text file (that we loaded in the previous article) as a CSV file.
(click on the image for a larger version)
Saving as a CSV file is as easy as File, Save As, entering the file name we want, and selecting Save as type "CSV (Comma delimited)(*.csv)".
Our resulting file looks like this:
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However, trying to import this file into the webmail program showed the next problem. What was the sequence of data in the file supposed to be? That is, the webmail program was looking for the name in one place and the email address in another place — and I had to figure out which order was correct and where the data was supposed to be in the file.
That turned out to be a lot of trial and error. The program allowed me to import data in the CSV formats from the following programs: Outlook, Outlook Express, Palm Desktop, Netscape 7, WebEdge 2 and WebEdge 3. I found that the Outlook Express and Outlook CSV formats were complicated (perhaps every field had quotation marks, but Excel would only use them if a field had a comma in it).
My third attempt was Netscape 7 and that turned out to be a good choice. I still had to reorder the data in the file (I moved columns in Excel and then saved as a CSV file again).
The final data format looked like this:
(click on the image for a larger version)
Now, let's take a look at the Import dialog box in the webmail program. Here we select the input data format that we think will work (Netscape 7 works for us) and we select the CSV data file from our computer to upload to the ISP's webmail program.
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The final webmail address book, after importing the test data from Eudora, looked like this.
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As you can see, the last record was dropped. Eudora allows us to create mini-mailing lists by putting multiple email addresses into one nickname. The webmail program only allows single addresses. It discarded the record that had multiple addresses in it.
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<a href="http://www.terryscomputertips.com/computers/creating-the-addressbook-csv-file-and-importing-it-into-webmail.php">Creating the Addressbook CSV File and Importing it into Webmail</a>
Copyright © 2006-2007 Terry A. Stockdale. All rights reserved.
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