Why do manual Excel to VCF conversions often result in errors or missing contacts?

[Brinshalom01]

I recently tried converting an Excel file containing a large number of contacts into VCF format manually so I could import them into my phone and email clients. Unfortunately, after the conversion, I noticed several problems—some contacts were missing, others had incomplete fields (like phone numbers or email addresses), and a few entries were duplicated or incorrectly mapped. I followed basic online steps such as saving the Excel file as CSV and then converting it to VCF, but the results were still unreliable. This makes me wonder why manual Excel to VCF conversions so often lead to errors or data loss.

 

[rowanfletcher]

Manual Excel to VCF conversions fail so often because you’re forcing a spreadsheet into a format it was never built to become. Excel stores contact data as flat cells , while VCF expects a structured contact record with clearly defined fields. When you save Excel as CSV and convert it manually, things like phone labels, multiple emails, country codes and empty cells lose context. That’s why contacts go missing, fields break, or duplicates appear. CSV also strips formatting, which creates mapping errors during conversion.

For large contact lists, this gets worse. A proper Excel to vCard process needs field validation and structure awareness. When I ran into the same Excel to VCF issues, using Softaken Excel to vCard Converter fixed it because it maps columns correctly and prevents silent data loss. It’s built for bulk contact conversion, not guesswork.