Here is a tutorial
http://www.labnol.org/software/mail-...h-gmail/13289/
which I am trying to work on my machine.
That links talks about creating a mail merge in gmail.
The reason I am trying above is I sit usually in environments where
proxy exist/do not exist and this is a frequent situation for me.
I do not have a network admin configuring any sort of port mapping for
me to be able have a mail merge sort of thing.
What I want to know is,is there a way I can copy paste all the
contacts which I download from my gmail account.
What I see my contact list when I download from my gmail account is
624 rows and each row has a single column and delimiter being comma
,,, which is not once but many times.
I have tried exporting my contacts as csv files when it asks for type
:google csv or to use in outlook.

The situation which is troubling is uneven formatting of csv file that
I download.
In some places the number of comma ,,, appearance of star * ,presence
of phone number * are not certain.
So I can not go and copy paste manually 624 contacts to one excel
sheet as given on the above tutorial.
Is there an easy way to work in this situation.

Hi tkmsr, Have you tried just opening the csv file with Excel or Open Office Calc? A csv file is nothing more than a text file with commas separating what should be recognized as cells by a spreadsheet program.

Good luck. ;-)

Here is a tutorial
http://www.labnol.org/software/mail-...h-gmail/13289/
which I am trying to work on my machine.

That links talks about creating a mail merge in gmail.
When I open the csv files or import them in openoffice spreadsheet
what I see in my contact list when I download from my gmail account is
624 rows and each row has a single column and delimiter being comma
,,, which is not once but many times.


The situation which is troubling is uneven formatting of csv file that
I downloaded.Which does not open properly in any open office or spreadsheet
programme.

Have you tried just following the tutorial with out trying to open the file?

When you open a csv file, you have to choose a delimiter option to separate the values into cells.

Good luck. ;-)

Yes I have tried that delimiter option.
It is not coming in a proper format.The problem is the contacts are not well defined.At some places last name is replaced by first name,more than one phone number exist for some cells.Some cells do not carry any email,
some cell have information more than needed.
So even if I select a delimeter as , which I did before doing the first post of mine here the file after opening is not in a format so that I can select a column and paste it to some other excel sheet.
The columns have information from preceding columns and the cells overlap each other.

I think that three commas in a row means two blank fields.

Actually that is the problem 3 comma or 2 comma or 7 or 8 how many will occur that can not be predicted and cells of columns overlap in some cases so it is not a very cleanly formatted csv file that you can easily import.
So assuming what you say is correct then what can be done to resolve this?

I don't understand, how can cells "overlap"?

The content of one cell is coming inside another cell that is what I mean by overlap.
This has happened in some cells not all.

????????????????????

Maybe you can post a screenshot or something, that makes no sense at all. If you don't want to post the original data, at least make an example CSV file that does this.

Items in a CSV file cannot overlap, that's impossible. Each comma separates cells beginning from left to right, and each newline wraps to the next row of cells.

------------ EDIT ---------------

Do you mean that the text from one cell is so long that is continues on top of the next cell? If so, just resize the columns.

I do wish to give a snapshot or upload the no of columns is very large.Let me know I will upload some thing.

I don't understand.

The best option may be to go into your gmail account and clean up the contact entries. Other than that you may need to open the csv with a text editor and clean it up that way.

Good luck. ;-)

That is exactly what I do not want to do.I have 3000 entries and updating them would be painful.

I gramatically don't understand that sentence. Maybe you could re-tell it and I would understand.

Do you mean that you would like to upload it, but it's very large? If so, compress it with gzip and post it here. Here's how:

The last renaming to .txt is so that the forum would allow it.