48 25 May – 7 June 2022 • Issue 632
In The Club
Run a club or society? Here's how your tech can make it easier
Next issue: Update weekly scores in Google SlidesSelect your CSV contacts file, then click ImportPass on members’ contact details
M
embers’ contact details are vital for
the efficient running of any club,
but what happens when one secretary
leaves and another starts? That was the
question posed by reader Henry Smith,
who asked us how he could transfer his
list of email addresses to the incoming
club secretary.
Transferring contacts is fairly
straightforward, and all email services
let you export and import contacts
between different services. Henry uses
Gmail, so we’ll explain how to do it using
that service, though there are similar
options in Outlook.Add labels to your contacts
First, you need to go to your Google
contacts by typing https://contacts.
google.com into a browser. If your
contacts contain both personal and club
entries, you should add a label to the
latter, so you can filter and view just
the contacts that you want to export.
Contacts can be added to multiple labels
if needed.
You add contacts to a label by clicking
the circular icon next to them. Once
you’ve added all your contacts, click the
label button at the top of the screen (it
looks like a gift tag) and then select an
existing label or click ‘Create label’ and
enter the name of your new label – we’veopted for Club. Click ‘Save’ when you’ve
finished.
Labels appear on the left, under the
Labels heading. Click the label that you’ve
created and you’ll see just the smaller
selection of Contacts. Now it’s time to
export them. To do this, click the Export
link on the left, then make sure your
label (Club in our case) is selected (^1 in
our screenshot above). If you want to
export all contacts, then select the main
Contacts header in Google Contacts and
then click Export^2.
You can leave the default Google CSV
option selected^3 , though as you can seeGoogle can also output Outlook CSV for
Microsoft accounts or vCard for iOS.
Click ‘Export’ when you’ve finished.Import the contacts file
This will download a CSV (Comma
Separated Value) file to your computer,
which you can send on to the next
secretary. This file can be imported into a
variety of email systems, but we’ll show
you how to do it in Google.
The new secretary needs to go to
their Google Contacts and click Import
on the left. Next, they need to select a
label at the top of the box, creating a new
one if necessary (we’ve stuck with ‘Club’-^1 in our screenshot left). Now click
‘Select file’^2 , choose the CSV file^3 , then
click Import^4.
Google also creates labels based on
when the contacts were originally created
or updated – for example, ‘Imported
11/6/21’. To remove these labels, hover
over one and click the Bin icon. Choose
‘Keep all contacts and delete this label’
then click Delete. Repeat to remove all
labels that you don’t need.
You can repeat this process as many
times as you like, which is handy in case
you missed a couple of contacts the first
time around. It’s probably worth the
original secretary holding on to the contacts
for a short period of time to make sure
everything transferred as it should.
Make sure your
label is selected,
then leave
Google CSV
selected and
click Export1
1
(^23)
4
3
2