Problems Importing Contacts

Problems Importing Contacts

I experienced problems very similar to those that others have described when trying to import my contacts list. I exported the list from my Thunderbird v. 1.5.0.7 address book, choosing .CSV format. Having noted the advice to eliminate the apostrophe (�), I opened the file first in notepad, and did a search and replace to replace the � with nothing. It also occurred to me to eliminate the quotation marks (�). I then saved the file, retaining its .csv extension, and tried to import it. I received the same error message that others have,
�Please check whether the file is proper .xls or .csv file.�

I then imported it into Excel, and added column headings (field names) in the first row (these were not included in the original Thunderbird Export). I did not leave any spaces in the column heading names. I carefully used Save As, and chose CSV format when I saved from Excel. I then closed the file in Excel. I then tried importing again into Zoho, but got the same error message quoted above.

I then tried saving as Excel 97-2002 format. That gave allowed me to get to the second step in the importing process where I matched up my column headings with the field names available in Zoho CRM. However there were still problems of Zoho misinterpreting some of my fields, and not placing data in the fields where it belonged. I suspect that this is because I had included commas in some of the fields in my directory, and this threw off the field positions when those commas were combined with the commas added when I exported in CSV format.

I highly recommend that you add Tab delimited text as a format option for importing. It is very common for people to add commas to certain fields of their phone directory listings (the names of law firms are often separated by commas for example). It would not be practical for someone to go through hundreds of records by hand and eliminate all of the commas. On the other hand tabs are rare to non-existent within the fields of people�s address book entries. Excel can easily find tabs and use them to delimit the fields, and Zoho could too.

I also suggest that you test this a lot more yourselves by taking real address book data used by employees of your organization and or those of friends and family, and try exporting them from all the most popular email packages (Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape, Mozilla, etc), and work with your importing routines until you get the import function to work the first time. Most address book data is confidential, so you are probably finding that few public users want to forward their files to you for testing as you request.

Also I recommend that you spell out more details of what the user needs to do to prepare his/her file for importing, so the he/she is aware that they need to do this before starting the import process.

Until these things are done, I believe that most people will judge Zoho CRM to be an interesting concept, but one that is a work in process, not yet an efficient, reliable tool. It�s nice to have a long list of features that impress journalists, but users will not rate your software highly until it works reliably the first time and every time that they try to import data.

Once these things are done I will be glad to go to places on the Web where software of this type is rated, and post a favorable review. For now though, I will wait and hope that the importing feature is improved substantially soon.