Many users use Google to manage their contacts. This means they can access them at any time using the browser on their computer and at the same time have the latest version of the database available on their Android devices.

Unfortunately, there is no automatic synchronization with the Microsoft program Excel. To use the contacts in the Office tool, you have to export them from Google and import them back into Excel.

To do this, log into your Google account in your browser and open the “Contacts” list. If you move your mouse over the individual entries, a checkbox will appear in front of each one.

Check all the contacts you want to import into Excel. Otherwise, Google will export the entire list.

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Click on the “Export” icon at the top of the list. It is the second one from the right and shows a small tub with an arrow pointing upwards. A dialog box offers you the formats “Google CSV”, “Outlook CSV” and “vCard”.

Leave it at the default “Google CSV” and click “Export”. Your browser will then save a file called “contacts.csv” in your download folder.

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You could now load the data from this CSV file directly into Excel with a double click, but you would then have a lot of work to do to correctly assign the data in the table.

For this reason, the following method is easier: Open a new, empty Excel workbook and go to the “Data” ribbon. On the far left in the “Get and transform data” section, click “From text/CSV”.

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Click through to the file “contacts.csv”, usually located in the folder “C:\Users\(username)\Downloads”. Please double-click the file.

Excel will then show a preview of the table. First, check whether the program displays the umlauts ü, ä and ö correctly. If this is not the case, you may need to change the “File origin” dropdown menu to “65001: Unicode (UTF-8)”.

If everything is OK, click “Load” to import the data into Excel. Delete any columns you don’t need by right-clicking on the column letter at the top and selecting “Delete Cells”.

The column titles appear in English – this is how the data is stored internally at Google. To edit a title, click on it once with the left mouse button and correct it in the input line.

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Once everything is correct, save the table in XLSX format using “File –› Save”.