Convert VCF to CSV on a Mac

What Contacts on a Mac can export

The Export menu has three items: Export vCard, Contacts Archive and Export as PDF. That is the whole list in macOS 27, and earlier versions had no CSV either.

The gap is no accident. A vCard is built to move a person from one address book to another, so it keeps one detail per line: a line for the name, a line for each phone number, a line for each email. A spreadsheet wants the opposite, one person per row. The page on what a VCF file holds shows those lines.

The other two items don’t help. Contacts Archive saves a backup, a file ending in .abbu, that only Contacts opens. The PDF is for printing.

So the vCard is the way out.

Get the .vcf out of Contacts or iCloud

In the Contacts app:

1. Click All Contacts in the sidebar, or one list.
2. Select the people you want. Command-A selects everyone shown.
3. Choose File > Export > Export vCard.
4. Pick a folder and click Save.

You get one .vcf with every selected contact in it. Dragging the selection onto the desktop makes the same file.

iCloud does it from any computer:

1. Sign in at icloud.com/contacts.
2. Choose Select All Contacts.
3. Choose Export vCard.

But check one setting first. Under Contacts > Settings > vCard there is a box labeled “Export photos in vCards”. With it on, every photo goes into the file as a long block of text, and the file grows. A CSV can’t hold photos, so you lose nothing by turning it off.

Convert the .vcf to CSV in your browser

The VCF to CSV converter is a web page that runs in Safari, Chrome or Firefox. It reads the file on your Mac and uploads nothing.

1. Drag the .vcf from Finder onto the page. Several files at once are fine.
2. Pick a column set: Excel / Google Sheets for a plain sheet, or Google Contacts, Outlook, HubSpot, Salesforce (Lead) or Krane.
3. Check the preview. It shows the first 10 contacts in those columns, and Show all lists the rest.
4. Click Download .csv.

The CSV has one row per contact. The column sets exist because an import screen matches columns by their header: pick Outlook and the phone column is headed Business Phone, the name Outlook expects.

It takes a file from anywhere, including one somebody emailed you, in vCard 2.1, 3.0 or 4.0. Nothing is added to your own address book.

But a row has limits. A person with three phone numbers still gets one row, so the Excel / Google Sheets set puts all three in one cell, separated by semicolons. Photos are skipped.

The Numbers route, with no converter

Apple’s Contacts guide documents a second route. It needs only Numbers.

1. Select the contacts in Contacts.
2. Open a new spreadsheet in Numbers.
3. Drag the selection onto the table. Numbers fills one row per person.
4. Choose File > Export To > CSV.

If the people are already in your Contacts app and all you want is a sheet, this is enough.

It has a couple of drawbacks. First, it starts from the Contacts app, not from a file. A .vcf somebody sent you has to be imported into your address book before you can drag anything. Second, Numbers decides the columns, so you can’t ask for Outlook’s or HubSpot’s headers. Apple adds a warning of its own: dragged this way, your own card includes the fields you chose not to share.

Open the CSV in Numbers or Excel

Double-click the CSV, or drag it onto the Numbers icon. Numbers reads the file as UTF-8, the encoding that covers accents and non-Latin scripts. “José” arrives as “José”.

Excel doesn’t assume UTF-8. Given a file with no marker at the start, it can read the bytes as an older character set and show “José”. The marker is three bytes called a byte-order mark. The converter writes it unless you switch it off, so a double-click in Excel shows the name correctly.

Phone numbers are the other problem. Excel treats a string of digits such as 0412555142 as a number and drops the leading zero. It can drop a plus sign the same way. If that happens, import the file through Excel’s Data tab and set the phone columns to text.

CSV to vCard on a Mac

The converter also runs the other way. Switch the direction to CSV → VCF, drop in the CSV, and check that each column found the right contact field. The download is one .vcf in vCard 3.0 that you can AirDrop to an iPhone or send to someone.

On your own Mac you may not need it. Contacts reads a CSV directly: choose File > Import, pick the file, and match each column to a field. The .vcf is for getting the same people onto a phone or into someone else’s address book.