How to Convert VCF Contacts to Excel or CSV

You exported your contacts — from your iPhone, Gmail, Outlook, or an old phone you're retiring — and got a .vcf file. Now you need those names, numbers, and emails in a spreadsheet for a mail merge, a CRM import, or just a readable backup. Here's the fastest way to do it, and what to watch out for along the way.

Why you can't just rename .vcf to .csv

A VCF file isn't delimited data — it's a sequence of BEGIN:VCARD…END:VCARD blocks, each holding tagged properties like FN:Jane Doe and TEL;TYPE=CELL:555-111-2222. Renaming the extension to .csv and opening it in Excel just dumps that raw syntax into a single column. Worse, a single contact often has multiple phone numbers or emails — each its own TEL or EMAIL line — which doesn't map onto a fixed set of spreadsheet columns without some decision about how to combine them. You need something that actually understands the vCard structure. For background on what's inside one, see What is a VCF file?

Convert VCF to CSV in your browser

The free VCF to CSV converter on LegacyFile handles the whole format, including the parts that trip up naive converters:

Drop your .vcf file into the converter. Parsing happens entirely on your device — your contacts are never uploaded anywhere.
It unfolds wrapped lines — vCard caps line length, so long values (a detailed NOTE, for instance) wrap across multiple physical lines that need to be rejoined before they mean anything.
It decodes QUOTED-PRINTABLE automatically. Older exports (vCard 2.1, common from Outlook and some Android phones) encode accented names as raw hex like Jos=C3=A9 instead of José. The converter detects this and decodes it back to normal text.
It joins multi-value fields into one readable cell. A contact with three phone numbers gets one "Phones" cell like Cell: 555-111-2222; Work: 555-333-4444; Home: 555-777-8888 instead of losing two of the three numbers.
Check the summary — total contacts, vCard version, and how many have a phone or email on file — then preview the flattened table before exporting.
Export CSV, XLSX, or JSON. The CSV/XLSX opens directly in Excel, Google Sheets, or Numbers; most CRM and mail-merge tools import CSV directly too.

What ends up in each column

The converter normalizes every contact to the same set of columns regardless of which app exported the file:

| Column | Source | | ---------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------- | | Full Name | FN, or built from N (given + family) if FN is missing | | First Name / Last Name | The given/family components of the structured N property | | Organization / Title | ORG and TITLE | | Phones / Emails | Every TEL/EMAIL line, joined with their TYPE label | | Address | The ADR property, assembled into one readable line | | Birthday | BDAY, normalized to YYYY-MM-DD when possible | | Notes | Every NOTE property |

Fields the format doesn't commonly carry usefully into a spreadsheet — like embedded PHOTO data — are intentionally left out of the export rather than dumped in as unreadable base64.

A note on multi-contact files

If your export is your whole address book in one file, that's expected — a .vcf can hold any number of BEGIN:VCARD blocks back to back, and the converter turns each one into its own row. There's no need to split the file first.

When something looks off

The converter never fails silently: if a card is missing its closing END:VCARD, or a line doesn't match the expected PROPERTY:value shape, it's kept anyway and flagged in a warnings list rather than dropped or crashing the whole import. That's the safest default when you're migrating contacts you can't easily re-export.