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My parents have recently each purchased an iPhone 5 and asked me to set them up. One of the most important things when changing mobile phones is transferring your contacts. But Apple don’t make it very easy.
I’m an Android man, I have never owned an Apple device nor do I know much about how they work or behave. Which is probably similar to quite a few people out there. So I turn to good old Google for a bit of advice.
Hours of searching on Google turned up a lot of rubbish about how you can back up your contacts through iTunes (which doesn’t seem to be supported any more), or backing up to and managing them through Gmail or Yahoo Mail, which would be good if I wanted to do that, but I wanted to get them onto the iCloud so they can synchronise and constantly update from that source. So I had to get a little bit creative and I thought that I’d share it with you who may be wanting the same end result – transferring your contacts quickly and easily (for free) from your Blackberry device in bulk onto the iCloud, here’s how…..
You will need:
Step 1 – Perform a sync between your Blackberry device and your Outlook program. Once this is complete you should see all your contacts in your outlook program. This is an ideal time to make whatever changes you need to as Outlook is a very easy program to use for this.
Step 2 – Once you have finished making any changes to your contacts you need to export them from Outlook. To do this firstly make sure you are in the contacts section in outlook, then:
Outlook will now Export your contacts to a CSV file on your computer.
Step 3 – Now that you have exported your contacts from Outlook you’ll probably be thinking, just like I did, can’t I just upload this onto iCloud? Well unfortunately you can’t as CSV files are not something iCloud will recognise, sorry to disappoint! But luckily there isn’t a lot more work to do.
This step involves using a Yahoo! account as a tool. If you haven’t got one you can sign up for free, use it for what you need it for and then delete it afterwards.
If you want to you can delete your Yahoo account now as we have used it for everything we need.
Step 4 – Your contacts are now in the correct format (vCard) to upload onto the iCloud, however, they are not in the correct version of vCard. Yahoo exports to version 2.1 whereas iCloud will only recognise version 3.0 or higher, luckily it’s dead easy to rectify this issue.
I found this information through Google on a website called electronmedia.in. I have used the parts I needed which worked perfectly, but credit for the original idea goes to this webpage: http://www.electronmedia.in/wp/fix-vcfvcards-importing-errors-icloud/ Thanks guys!
Step 5 – You’re now ready to upload your contacts to the iCloud.
This is the best (free) way I could work out how to get all of my parents’ contacts transferred. Now I’m no computer genius by any means, so I may have missed something out there where you can do all the above in a couple of clicks, but I failed to find it! If there is feel free to leave comments below and let others know because it’s damn hard to find.
Thanks for reading this post, as I said, if you have any comments please share them below.
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I was suggested this web site by my cousin. I am not sure whether this
post is written by him as nobody else know such
detailed about my trouble. You are amazing! Thanks!
Great explanation!
Thanks for taking some time to share this with us!
Greetings from Brazil.
I’m glad it worked for you! 🙂
Hello I did this a slightly different way
Follow your instructions as per step 1 and 2 for step 3
3. download a program called textpad and follow the instructions here http://www.electronmedia.in/wp/fix-vcfvcards-importing-errors-icloud/
Hi, thanks for your comment.
You’ll find that’s exactly what I described here and I credited and referenced that website in the body of the post.
Thanks a million, Mark. This actually worked! You wouldn’t believe how many failed attempts I’d made at doing this.
Glad to hear it mate! 🙂
This is a topic that’s near to my heart… Cheers! Where are
your contact details though?
Which contact details?
I’m not positive where you’re getting your information, however good topic.
I must spend some time learning more or figuring out more.
Thanks for great information I used to be looking for this info for my mission.
I’m happy it helped you 🙂
There is definately a lot to find out about this issue.
I love all the points you have made.
Thanks, glad you liked it!
Hey mark, this has been really useful but whenever I go to my yahoo account to import the contacts from the CSV file. it keeps saying Success ! but it says 0 contacts have been added and this is constantly happening 🙁 . Its for my parents aswell and Im unhappy that its not working out for me when I do it. the file size of the .csv excel file is 171kb maybe that has something to do with it because I Cant understand what else it could be. Everything else works fine, if there is anything you know or could help with would be greatly appreciated.
thanks
Fez
Hey fez, thanks for your comment. I’ll check it out when I’m home and I’ll get back to you, hopefully next week? M 🙂
Hi Fez,
In Outlook are you exporting the correct set (or group) of contacts? I have a number of sets, some of which don’t have any contacts in, if you were to export them into a CSV and import them into Yahoo it would be successful but with no contacts.
Also it might be worth opening your CSV file in excel to check to see if the correct data is in there.
Hope this solves it. Let me know if it doesn’t 🙂
all sorted out Mark, thanks for taking the time to reply. I had to import the contacts into my gmail account instead of yahoo, as it just wasnt working for me. Have sorted it out now. thanks for this tutorial it really helped. cheers have a good weekend.
Hey fez, I’m glad it worked out! Have a good weekend too! 🙂
This is fantastic and worked really well. Many Thanks
Hey thanks for your comment! I’m glad it worked for you 🙂
great submit, very informative. I ponder why the other specialists of this sector do not
realize this. You should proceed your writing. I am sure, you have a huge readers’ base already!
Hey thanks for your comment. Yes I have done a lot of reading around and I can’t find anything like this solution anywhere. I had to cobble a few ideas together but I got it to work in the end!
Thank you sooo much! this really helped me out! My ipad used to sync with yahoo directly, but stopped for some reason. But this solved my immediate issue, which was to at least get my contacts onto the icloud! yay! mission accomplished. : )
Hey there, I’m really glad it’s helped you out!
It’s made my day to know that this post has helped at least one person. Have a nice weekend! 🙂
Took me a while to find this post but it was worth it!
only way i could get it to work!
Thanks
Hey Jordan, thanks for your comment, I’m really glad it works for you! 🙂 M
Dear Mark,
Thank you for this explanation, however i struggle at step 2: once I export my contacts to the file (it is a very small file which is weird since I have around 300 contacts) and then import the contacts in Yahoo contacts, they say ‘Congratulations, 0 contacts were imported’
What am I doing wrong? I think it has something to do with my outlook contacts?
Many thanks for your advice!
Charlotte
Hi Charlotte,
Thanks for your comment. Have you selected the correct contacts group within Outlook? Maybe you are selecting a group with no contacts in it?
If you are selecting the correct group, try opening the file as a text file and seeing if your contacts are there.
Let me know what you find and I’ll try to help you work through it.
Thanks M@rk for the detailed article, will be useful for people having BB, I don’t have lol