What is a VCF file?
VCF (short for vCard File, and often called a “vCard”) is the standard plain-text format for exchanging contact information. Every phone, email client, and address book app — iCloud, Gmail, Outlook, Android — can export contacts as .vcf. Structurally it's simple: each contact is a BEGIN:VCARD / END:VCARD block, and a single .vcf file can hold one contact or your entire address book concatenated together. Where it gets messy is the details inside: folded lines, legacy character encodings, and repeated properties for multi-value fields like phone numbers. For the full breakdown, read What is a VCF file? in the Learn section.
Why convert VCF to CSV?
A .vcf file only opens usefully in a contacts app — drag it into Excel or Google Sheets and you get one unreadable column of raw vCard syntax. Converting to CSV is the fastest way to get contacts into a spreadsheet for a mail merge, a CRM import, a phone migration, or just a backup you can actually read. See How to convert VCF contacts to Excel or CSV for a step-by-step walkthrough.
What's inside a VCF file, briefly
Every contact is a list of properties, each on its own line (or folded across several when long). Six of them matter most:
- FN / N: Full display name, plus the structured family/given name.
- ORG / TITLE: Company and job title.
- TEL: Phone numbers — a card can have any number of these, each tagged CELL/HOME/WORK/FAX.
- EMAIL: Email addresses, same repeat-and-tag pattern as TEL.
- ADR: Structured street address: street, city, region, postal code, country.
- BDAY / NOTE: Birthday and free-text notes.
The converter walks all of this for you: it unfolds wrapped lines, decodes QUOTED-PRINTABLE character encoding from older exports, joins repeated phone/email values into one readable cell per contact, and flattens everything into one row per vCard.
How to convert VCF to CSV
- Drop your .vcf file above (or paste its contents). Parsing happens on your device — the file is never uploaded.
- Check the summary: contact count, vCard version, and how many contacts have a phone or email on file.
- Preview the flattened contacts — names, joined phone/email lists, and addresses.
- Export as CSV for Excel, XLSX, or JSON.
Troubleshooting VCF files
Why do some contacts have multiple phone numbers or emails in one cell?
A vCard can repeat the TEL and EMAIL properties as many times as a contact has numbers or addresses, each tagged with a TYPE like CELL, HOME, or WORK. Since a CSV row can't hold a variable number of columns, this converter joins them into one readable cell per contact — for example "Cell: 555-111-2222; Work: 555-333-4444" — instead of silently keeping only the first one.
My contact names look like gibberish with = signs. What happened?
Older vCard 2.1 exports (common from Outlook and some Android phones) encode any name with accented or non-ASCII characters as QUOTED-PRINTABLE — you'll see raw text like "Jos=C3=A9" instead of "José". This converter detects and decodes QUOTED-PRINTABLE automatically, including values that wrap across multiple lines, so accented names come out correctly.
What's the difference between .vcf and .vcard files?
Nothing — .vcf and .vcard are the same vCard format with two different file extensions in common use. A single .vcf file can also hold more than one contact: it's just multiple BEGIN:VCARD…END:VCARD blocks concatenated together, and this converter handles any number of them in one file.
Is this VCF converter really free?
Yes — every file parses and previews free with no signup and no upload. Free exports include the first 100 contacts; a one-time $19 license unlocks unlimited exports on every LegacyFile tool.