Move Google Contacts to Outlook with a clean CSV

A contact migration is safer as a staged process: export, preserve, inspect, clean, test, and only then import the complete list.

1. Export the intended contacts

In Google Contacts, select the contacts or label you intend to move and export them as CSV. Record what you selected so you can reproduce the export. If the account contains automatically collected addresses, decide whether those belong in the migration.

2. Keep an untouched source export

Do not edit the only export. Store it as a rollback copy and duplicate it for cleaning. This matters because spreadsheet applications may reinterpret phone numbers, dates, leading zeros, and long numeric values as soon as the file is opened.

3. Inspect fields and encoding

Confirm that the first row contains headings and that names with accents or non-Latin characters display correctly. Outlook recommends UTF-8 for multilingual contacts. If a row contains a comma inside an address or note, it should be properly quoted so it does not shift the remaining fields.

4. Reduce duplicate risk before importing

Repeated migrations are a common source of duplicates. Normalize email addresses and phone punctuation, then merge only exact identifier matches. Preserve conflicting non-empty fields for review. Google Contacts can merge duplicates within one account, but it cannot merge contacts saved in different Google accounts.

5. Match the Outlook workflow

Classic Outlook lets you map source fields and choose whether to replace, allow, or skip duplicates. New Outlook has a simpler CSV import flow. In either case, review the preview and confirm that name, email, phone, company, and notes land where expected.

6. Test before the full import

Use a small file containing the header and several representative contacts. Include a non-English name, an international phone number, a postal address with commas, and a record that might duplicate an existing Outlook contact. Inspect the imported results before processing the full list.

Validate the cleanup with a local tool

Contact CSV Doctor Lite recognizes common Google and Outlook contact fields, handles comma, semicolon, and tab delimiters, normalizes common values, and merges exact matches. It processes up to 25 contacts locally so you can validate a sample without uploading it.