Convert my Excel contacts to iCloud

Family contact list lives in a carefully maintained Excel sheet and I want it in iCloud so everyone's iPhones finally share it.

iCloud apparently refuses CSV. What is the conversion path?

Correct on the refusal, iCloud's contact import speaks vCard exclusively, so the path is Excel to CSV to vCard to iCloud, with the middle conversion having a trick that avoids installing anything.

1

Prepare the sheet in Excel: one header row using recognizable names, First Name, Last Name, E-mail Address, Mobile Phone and the like, no merged cells, then File, Save As, CSV UTF-8, the encoding choice protecting any accented family names.

2

Convert through Google Contacts as the free translator: at contacts.google.com use Import to bring the CSV in, checking a few entries mapped correctly, then immediately Export selecting vCard format. Google reads CSV liberally and writes clean multi contact vCards, exactly the translation needed and a throwaway Google account serves fine if the family list should not touch your main one.

3

Import at iCloud: sign in at icloud.com, open Contacts, click the gear at the lower left and choose Import vCard, feeding it the exported file. The contacts land in iCloud and flow to every iPhone signed into the family's shared Apple ID or via sharing, per how the family devices are arranged.

4

Verify on a phone, spot checking names with accents and multi number entries, then declare the Excel sheet retired or demote it to an export target, since two masters is how the careful maintenance unravels.

The Outlook variant of the middle step for anyone allergic to the Google hop: import the CSV into desktop Outlook's contacts, select all and use the Forward as Business Card trick to produce vcf files, combined with the copy command as covered in the multiple vCard thread linked alongside. Same destination, Microsoft translator instead of Google.

CSV UTF-8 through Google and out as one vCard, imported at icloud.com in minutes, 240 family contacts on every phone by dinner. The retire the sheet advice was correctly anticipated, my mother has been informed the spreadsheet era has ended.