Maybe you don’t want to use outlook, maybe you don’t have a windows xp or vista pc, or maybe active sync or WMDC is just not working. In any case, there is another way to bulk copy contacts to your windows mobile 5 or windows mobile 6 device.

1. Download PIMBackup. Also you can download the user guide there as well.

This is a great program. It doesn’t need to install at all (are you other software vendors listening here?) so don’t run it on your pc.

2. Unzip and copy the PPCPimBackup.exe file to your phone. The best place to put this is on your storage card so it doesn’t use up your builtin memory.

3. Use file explorer on your phone to browse to where the .exe is and run it.

4. under options, select “create shortcut”. This will make a shortut to the app in your programs section so you don’t have to go and find the app when you want to run it

5. On your computer, export your contacts from whatever program they are in as a .csv file (comma seperated values). I’ll use outlook as an example.

file>import and export

choose export to a file

choose comma separated values (dos)

select your contacts folder

Then save the file on your desktop or somewhere easy to get to.I called this file contacts.csv and this is how I will be refering to it throughout the rest of this post, but you can name the file anything you want.

6. Fix any problems with the file

The only problem with the file that outlook exports is that there is no “FullName” column. If I were to import this file to my phone, everyone’s name would show up as “Unknown”. That really makes it hard to call someone. I could edit every single one of these unknown people on my phone and change the “File As” field and the phone would then give that contact a name. However, I have over 300 contacts and I don’t want to do that 300 times. If your export has the fullname field somewhere, then skip down to step 7.

The easiest thing is to open the contacts.csv file in excel, and add the fullname column using a formula.

right click the first column and click insert to add a new column

The first row in this column must be the name of the column, so type in “FullName”

Then go down one cell to A2 and type    =C2&” “&E2  (make sure to use the double quotes). If your first name column is not C, then replace the C with the letter of the column the first name is in. If your last name column is not E, then replace the E with the letter of the column the last name is in.

With A2 highlighted, put your mouse over the lower right corner of the cell and it will turn into a thin black plus sign. Click and drag down until you have selected all the way down to your last contact. Release the mouse button and this column should now be filled with everyone’s full name. If you had some contacts without last names, you can go and delete the extra space this formula adds after the first name if you want, but it won’t hurt anything if you leave it in. There are more complicated formulas that will only add the space if indeed there is a last name, but this is not the place for that kind of complexity.

Now that you have a full name column, save the file and exit excel.

7. click on your contacts.csv file and change the extension to .csc

If your file does not show the .csv extension (and you are in windows xp/vista) open an explorer window and click tools>folder options>view and uncheck the box “hide extensions for known file types”. If you are in vista and can’t find the tools menu, press alt+t to get to it. Vista hides these menus by default. While you are here, you can check the box “always show menus” if you would like explorer to act more like it did in xp.

8. Copy the contacts.csc file to your mobile phone.

I made a folder on my microSD card called backups and put this file there just to keep things organized. You can reuse this folder when you perform regular backups on you phone.

9. Open up PIMBackup on your phone, and change the action to restore

10. Click browse to go to your backup folder on your microSD card (or wherever you put the contacts.csc file) and select the contacts.csc file (or whatever it’s name is) and click the done button.

11. You now have the chance to modify the field mapping, but this program does a pretty good job of guessing where to put everything.

TADA! You have just imported all your contacts onto your phone. I suggest leaving this program on your phone and doing regular backups with it. This is a great program and can be used to copy everything to a new windows mobile phone, or restore everything if you have to perform a hard reset on your device. See the user guide for specific instructions on setting up a schedule and performing backups using PIMBackup.

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