Always Have Your Contacts

Have your ever lost all your contacts? Were you mad with yourself because you didn't have a backup system in place? Try importing your contacts to Gmail, a service of Google (if you don't have an account, it's free) and you'll never have to worry again.

You don't have to get rid of your other accounts, this is just to have a central location for all your contacts. Once you're finished exporting from your other locations, you can import them to your mobile devices. Cool, eh?

Importing from Yahoo!

1. On your Yahoo! Mail page, click Options in the upper-right corner and select More Options.
2. From the list on the left side, click Contacts.
3. Click the "Tools" button just below the Contacts tab.
4. Click "Export".
5. You options are:
• Microsoft Outlook:
• Netscape/Thunderbird:
• Yahoo! CSV:
• vCard Single File: (recommended for Palm Desktop users)
• vCard, Zip of .VCF files

Importing from Outlook

1. Click the File tab.
2. Click Options.
3. Click Advanced.

4. Under Export, click Export.

5. In the Import and Export Wizard, click Export to a file, and then click Next.
6. Under Create a file of type, click the type of export that you want, and then click Next.

The most common is Comma Separated Values (Windows), also known as a CSV file.

7. Under Select folder to export from, select the contact folder that you want to export, and then click Next.

 Note    Unless you chose to export to an Outlook Data File (.pst), you can only export one folder at a time.

8. Under Save exported file as, click Browse, select a destination folder, and in the File name box, type a name for the file.
9. Click OK.
10. In the Export to a File dialog box, click Next.
11. Click Finish.

Import from Hotmail

• Select Contacts from the top Hotmail navigation bar.
• Click Print View.
• Highlight the contents of the table (including the headings Name, E-Mail and Phone as well as all your contacts) with the mouse.
• Press Ctrl-C (Windows), Command-C (Mac) or Alt-C (Linux) to copy the table.
• Create a new spreadsheet document in Excel or OpenOffice.org.
• Select Edit | Paste from the menu.
• Look for rows that have the E-Mail column empty. You can sort the data by the column to find and manipulate them en bloc.
• If you have any email addresses in the first, the Name column, cut and paste them to the second, the E-Mail column.
• In the E-Mail column, remove all whitespace characters.
  • In Excel, right-click in an email field and select Column | Trim from the menu.
  • In OpenOffice.org, you can search for "[:space:]+$" (excluding the quotation marks), making sure Regular expressions is checked under More Options, and replace it with nothing.
• Select File | Save As... from the menu.
• Make sure you use CSV (Comma delimited)(*.csv) or Text CSV (.csv) or a similar format involving "CSV" for saving the file.

Now you can import your contacts and their email addresses from the saved .csv file to your desired email program or service.If you want to sync your phone with your Gmail account, click this.