Windows program for reading vcard files. Opening a .vcf file: overview of methods

1. Windows Contacts

This file is opened using a standard application called Windows Contacts. To use it, right-click on the file and in the drop-down menu, hover over the line “Open with” and select the desired program. It can also be found in the Start menu.

Rice. No. 1. Open in Windows Contacts

Attention! If the text is not printed in Latin, it will be displayed in hieroglyphs.

2.Outlook

If you have the Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of office programs on your computer, then you also have Outlook.

Using it is exactly the same - press the right button and select Outlook in the list of available programs.

The problem with this contact reader is the same as mentioned above - the Cyrillic alphabet will not be read.

3. Standard text editors

Also, absolutely any standard text editors are suitable for opening VCF - Notepad, Notepad++ and the like.

The fact is that such files are text files and in such editors they will open in the form of a special code. But it is very easy to decipher. Among all the lines you can easily find your name, phone number and other data. An example of this can be seen below.

Rice. No. 2. Opening in Notepad

And you can open it in exactly the same way as described above - press the right button and select a program, or open the program and select a file in it.

4. Gmail

To use it, do this:

• Open your mail. Click the "Gmail" button and select "Contacts" from the menu that appears.

Rice. No. 3. Contacts in Gmail

• Next, select “More” and “Import”.
• In the next window you will need to choose where to get the data from. There is a clause regarding VCF. Just click on it, indicate where the file is located and follow the copying process.

Important! The system may prompt you to upgrade to an older version of Gmail. Agree with this proposal. And in the old version, click “More” at the top, select “Import” and also indicate where the file is located.

Rice. No. 4. Choosing a contact path

The “My Contacts” section will appear in your mail, where you can view all the data from the file.

As you can see, there is nothing complicated in this procedure. Write in the comments which method helped you!

What is a vcf file and how can it be opened on a computer? Many users may discover such a file by accident, while others create it intentionally to store information.

But in both of these cases the file you may need to open it to view the information stored in it.

Definition

What is this file, where can it be found, and what is it for? This format has the data of a saved contact recorded in a smartphone or telephone.

Information (contacts) in this format can be found in the memory of a smartphone, tablet, and even a PC (if devices were synchronized or data was transferred).

Where does this file come from? It appears after updating the phone's firmware and contains all the data from the device’s phone book.

This file is created by the user independently (the operating system does not create it automatically, for example, during failures).

It may be subject to export, import from and to the system, viewing, etc. Thus, it is necessary for fast and accurate

Sometimes this method can even open files created on other devices (with a different operating system).

In order to use this method, do the following:

1 Sign in to Google mail;

2 Move your cursor to the Gmail button at the top left of the screen;

3 In the drop-down list, go to the section Contacts;

4 In the left list that will open after updating the window, click on the button More;

5 In the expanded list, find the item Import;

6 In the pop-up window, specify Import from CSV file;

7 In the updated window, find the button Go to the previous version of contacts and click on it;

8 A new window will open - at the top of it, find More button and click on it;

9 Go to Import in the drop-down list;

10 Click on the button Choose File and indicate what exactly needs to be opened;

11 Click Import;

12 Now The contact appears in the Google mail contact list.

The good thing about this method is that does not require downloading additional programs, although it has good functionality. However, you must have a Google mail account. And besides, the process itself is quite labor-intensive and long.

We continue to examine files of various programs and with extensions that are incomprehensible at first glance for the average user. And today we have .vcf files (from vCard File developed by Internet Mail Consortium).

What are these files and what information can they contain inside?

Can they harm your personal computer?
Vcf files are files (contact cards) that in most cases contain information (last name, first name, middle name, identification number, email address, phone numbers, fax number, Internet page addresses) and can be used to attach to emails with subsequent downloading and adding it to the database of your contacts.

Or, more simply, a person’s electronic business card is created programmatically. In the overwhelming majority, they cannot cause any harm other than the loss of personal personal data of a specific person.

From the above it follows that to view them on your local computer, it is enough to have one of the common email programs installed (Outlook, Eudora OSE).

The Windows operating system itself has an installed program for viewing such contact cards; you can launch it by selecting Start menu - All Programs - Accessories - Address Book (Windows Contacts).

You can also use a large number of free online services like Open Contacts, or directly import/export contact data from email services like Gmail (Google).

Select "Import VCARD File (.vcf)" and click "Next". You can open .VCF files either with special programs from our list or with the standard Windows Address Book. There is an issue when importing Google Android phonebook backup files into Outlook.

The built-in vcf viewer in Windows7 incorrectly opens only 10 out of 200 and with crappy ones instead of Russian.2. Copy it to your computer, unzip the zip, copy the multi-vcf file into the “My Documents/vCards” folder.3.

VCF files can be attached to emails and used by the recipient to import data into their contact database. Also included in the list of programs that support the VCF format is the Mozilla Thunderbird client, although add-ons must be installed to work with vCards. VCF is an extension of vCard files, which are used to store contact information for a person or company.

Click "File" - "Open and Export". On your computer, locate the VCF file and click Open. The new contact will be added to Outlook (Users section). On your computer, locate the VCF file you want to import. Download the free utility “VCard to XLS”. This is an Excel macro that converts VCF files to XLS format. You can download the utility from sourceforge.net/projects/vcf-to-xls/.

How to open VCF (VCARD)?

These files are often used for import and export, i.e. for exchanging electronic business cards between various programs or devices and their address books. The VCF file can also be sent via email with a message as an attachment. In Google Android, for example, contacts are stored in one file and separated by BEGIN and END tags. When exported to a memory card, they can be found in the System/PIM directory on the memory card.

Method 1 of 4: Add a VCF file to Outlook Contacts

A file with the .VCF extension is a text file in the vCard format for storing and exchanging electronic business cards. Such files are most often used for exchanging contacts or for backing up a list of contacts from a mobile phone to a computer. To do this, select File -> Import -> Business Card (vCard) from the menu. 1) The most popular and proven way was to upload to a Google account. Perhaps there are other encodings in the cards, if necessary, write to me and I’ll try to modernize the program.

Apparently the Easy Backup program does everything correctly, Windows just doesn’t know how to open multi-cards. There is also Russian text in the form: “N;CHARSET=UTF-8;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:=D0=96=D0=B0=D1=80=D0=BE=D0=B2;=D0=9C=D0 =B8=D1=85=D0=B0=D0=B8=D0=BB;;;".
We need a program for Windows that can correctly open multi-contact cards and correctly display Russian text instead of these rubbish.

The fact of the matter is that I don’t want to use Gmail and other email services. Outlook only with office, heavy. As a result, the algorithm is as follows: 1. We split the resulting multi-vcf into separate vcf files using vCardOrganaizer - Edit - Split.4. Editing vcf cards using vCardOrganaizer. Not super convenient, but still a working option.

Only contacts.google.com helped - they saw my contacts without any clutter from my old Sony Ericsson K770i phone and managed to transfer them to Android without any problems in the best possible way! VCF is an acronym for vCard File and this format is used to store personal contact information. MS Outlook is not distributed separately, so to install it you need to download the MS Office package and select the necessary components from it.

2) I opened the TheBat! email program, there was the necessary converter, and a bunch of my vcf files with contacts were exported to the address book. Everything was wonderful, but only Nokia Suite and TheBat! A vCard file consists of records, each of which contains information about one business card. CardOrganizer2.1 - works only with individual cards in the Windows Contacts folder, there is no way to open one multi-card.3. In 1996, all rights to the format were transferred to the Internet Mail Consortium.

When buying a new phone or flashing an old one, we are recommended to create a backup copy of contacts from the phone book, so as not to lose important information and not waste time entering numbers manually. After creating a copy and saving it on the computer, we need to open the .vcf file to view the contact's phone number. But how to do this and using what program? We will consider the answer to these questions below.

How to open a .vcf file?

The extension file.vcf is a subscriber’s business card, which stores information about the contact (name, phone, email, personal website and links to pages on social networks). It can be opened using standard tools of any mobile operating system. But in Windows there are some nuances.

Windows Address Book

Standard method that does not require installation of additional software. Right-click on the .vcf file and select “Open with” – “Windows Contacts”.

Attention! The built-in Windows Contacts program does not recognize the Cyrillic alphabet! If the numbers from your address book were signed in Russian, Ukrainian or Belarusian, they will not be displayed correctly!

Microsoft Outlook

If you have Microsoft Office preinstalled on your machine, you can open “contacts.vcf” using MS Outlook. To do this, drag the .vcf file onto the program's working window and follow the instructions. After viewing business card contact details, they will be saved in the email client's address book.

Nokia Suite

An epoch-making application from Nokia, in which creating a backup copy of contacts and restoring them is a small part of the entire functionality. The application will allow you to view contact data and restore it on your mobile device (if it is manufactured by Nokia Corporation).

Notepad++

A multifunctional text editor that supports many encodings and guarantees the correct display of information. The application cannot export data to mobile devices, but allows you to edit a contact: add, delete and edit information.

Google's Gmail

To view contacts in .vcf format, you can use Google services.

1. Create an account or sign in to Gmail.
2. Click on the drop-down list and click the “Contacts” button.
   
   
3. In the “More” tab, click “Import” – “Import from a CSV or vCard file.”
   
   
4. Confirm the transition to the previous version of contacts.
   
   
5. In the window that appears, click “More” - “Import”.

Due to the great popularity of mobile phones, smartphones and tablets, users are increasingly faced with the need to import and export contacts stored on these devices. If there are only a couple of dozen such contacts, then it is even more or less possible to dial them manually. But more often there is a situation when their number amounts to hundreds, and for fairly sociable people it can exceed the thousand mark. Therefore, to import and export contacts, mobile device manufacturers provide the ability to bulk process contacts using VCF files. Using vcf files, you can transfer contacts not only to smartphones and tablets, but also to many mobile phones that have the ability to connect to a computer. To do this, use the appropriate software supplied with the mobile phone: “Nokia PC Suite”, “Samsung PC Studio”, etc. In this regard, users have a logical question - how to open vcf file on computer. We will talk about this in this article.

What is the VCF format?

The vcf file format was invented to store contact information about a person. In particular:

Last name, first name and patronymic

Contact phone numbers

Photo

Email addresses

Website addresses

Contacts in Internet messengers

Date of Birth

Addresses of work, residence, etc.

The name VCF itself stands for vCard File, or business card file. Since a certain time, this format has been supported to one degree or another by most computer mail programs.

Essentially a vcf file is a text file that can be manually edited. Unfortunately, sometimes texts containing Cyrillic in these files are written in encoded form, which does not allow you to work with them directly in Notepad. For example, this is what a card for the name “Ivan Petrov” with a phone number looks like, exported from a mobile device.

If the digits of a phone number are readable and can be viewed or edited if desired, then for the first and last name this operation is extremely difficult.

Problem with encodings

Modern versions of Windows have the Windows Contacts application, which allows you to both open a vcf file on your computer and add it to the operating system contact list, where the file will be converted to *.contact format and will become available for editing using Windows tools. But this feature is only available for files written in Windows encoding. At the same time, many mobile devices and modern email applications save vcf files in modern UTF-8 encoding. And if you try to open such a file using Windows, the Cyrillic characters will not be read properly.

Interestingly, Windows encoded files are available for manual editing in any text editor. This is what the text content of a vcf file created using Microsoft Outlook looks like.

It would seem logical to convert all files to Windows encoding in order to be able to work with them on a computer, incl. and in text editors. However, the problem is that then these files cannot be used on other devices and in modern email programs. For example, the latest vcf file, despite the fact that it looks beautiful in Notepad and the Windows Contacts program, does not open correctly in the emClient email program.

The same problems arise when exporting vcf files to mobile devices. Therefore, the best way out of the situation is to use programs that can fully work with business cards in UTF-8 encoding. The above-mentioned emClient program is quite suitable for this purpose. Moreover, it can export files in UTF encoding so that the readability of Cyrillic characters is preserved.

Using emClient

You can download the program from download pages on the official site. After installation, the application will work for 30 days in full mode, after which you will need to either obtain a free license to use the limited home version, or purchase the program. As a matter of fact, the home version is quite capable of both opening a vcf file on a computer and editing all its fields, as well as doing bulk import and export of such files.

To add vcf files to the program, you need to either drag them into the program window using the mouse, or use the menu item “File / Import...”.

In the window that appears, select the option “Import contacts from vCard (.vcf)”.

After this, the program will scan the entire specified folder and import all found business cards. In our case, one file was imported.

Now you can open it in the general contact list for editing.

Similarly, using the “File / Export...” menu item, you can save the edited contacts to a separate folder as a list of vcf files.

conclusions

Using the emClient program, you can both open vcf files on your computer and fully edit their contents, working with data in the form of a contact list. Edited contact data can be exported back to a set of vcf files, which can be useful for manually transferring contacts to a mobile device or another computer. Due to the fact that the program understands files in modern UTF-8 encoding, there will be no problems with Cyrillic characters when exchanging data with modern mobile devices. And business cards exported by this program open in a text editor in a readable form, so you can, as an option, apply the bulk search and replace functions of the Notepad++ program to them.