Importing contacts and accounts in Excel

Importing contacts and accounts in Excel

I understand that in order to load contacts and accounts from a single Excel spreadsheet that contains all data, I need to first remove all contact information from the sheet, load the accounts and account IDs will be generated. I then map these account IDs to my new contacts only spreadsheet and import this sheet.
Does this mean that aside from the manual process of removing the contact information from spreadsheet, in order to map the account ids, I need to do this for each individual contact?
Am I missing something or is there an easier way to do this?