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How to parse mobile, home, work phone numbers when exporting contacts to a csv file?

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  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by sfhowes

j.b.stone
j.b.stone
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When I transitioned to Thunderbird Email, it was not immediately apparent to me that in Contacts the first number, second number, etc were unique to each contact. So - For example, I have many contacts where first number is home, others where first is work, and of course many where first is mobile. When I export the contacts to a csv, the numbers are exported by column, rather than by label. In addition to my personal contacts, I am maintaining a civic organization contact list. We want to be able to pull mobile numbers for group text notifications, but the Thunderbird export data in the current form is useless. Is there a way to export by label? The only other solution I can come up with would be to individually redo each entry with standardized 1st number etc. This would be many hundreds of entries.

When I transitioned to Thunderbird Email, it was not immediately apparent to me that in Contacts the first number, second number, etc were unique to each contact. So - For example, I have many contacts where first number is home, others where first is work, and of course many where first is mobile. When I export the contacts to a csv, the numbers are exported by column, rather than by label. In addition to my personal contacts, I am maintaining a civic organization contact list. We want to be able to pull mobile numbers for group text notifications, but the Thunderbird export data in the current form is useless. Is there a way to export by label? The only other solution I can come up with would be to individually redo each entry with standardized 1st number etc. This would be many hundreds of entries.

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sfhowes
sfhowes
  • Top 10 Contributor
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I don't know how you arrived at an address book with the wrong type of phone numbers in the different fields, perhaps they were imported from another app, but TB stores phone numbers in distinct fields: Work, Home, Fax, Pager and Mobile. If an address book is exported to a csv and viewed in a spreadsheet or similar, the numbers are in separate columns. There is no 'label' attached to a phone number - the column header indicates the type of number. You will have to edit the csv to put numbers in the right columns, and then import it back to TB, taking care to align the input fields with the address book fields.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Import_address_list_from_text_file