Migrate Phone Contacts from Old to New Phone

Background:

Friend had balckberry mobile phone and got a new Sony xperia M. The contacts from the blackberry were exported into a CSV and needed to be imported into the xperia.

The Sony PC companion is utter useless crapware, so you cannot import contacts from a CSV file directly, only other Sony (?) or Windows contacts can be imported. Besides, it kept telling me that I had to detach the old phone although I had specifically specified that I was importing my contacts from Windows.

Anyway, how do you get contacts that are stored in a CSV file into windows in the first place ? Microsoft has, depending on which program you use to open a CSV file, different interpretations to how a CSV file should look.

CSV stands for "Comma-separated Values", however, Excel wants CSV with "tab-separated Values" (you can open Excel and import the file as a workaround), Windows contacts import wizard wants another variant, "semi-colon separated values".

So, open the CSV file in OpenOffice, check comma (or whatever you have as a separator)  in the "Text Import" window, make sure the preview shows each field in a separate field and click Ok.

Click File > Save As and make sure you specify a new name, check "Edit filter settings" and click Save. Click "Use Text CSV format" and in the new window make sure "Field delimiter" is set to semi-colon and click Ok.

This file can now be imported as Windows contacts which you can then sync with your phone. Note that you will have to map fields during import, but that is pretty simple.