Import Excel contacts into a Lotus Notes account

I have a contact list in Excel that needs to go into a Lotus Notes address book, the personal names and address book in Notes.

What is the path from Excel to the Notes contacts?

Notes imports contacts through a structured format, and Excel gets there via CSV with attention to matching Notes' expected fields, so the path:

1

Prepare the Excel sheet: clean column headers matching contact fields, First Name, Last Name, Email, Business Phone and so on, one contact per row, then save as CSV, File, Save As, CSV, the format Notes import accepts.

2

In Lotus Notes open your Contacts, the personal address book and use File, Import, selecting the CSV file. Notes walks an import that maps the CSV columns to its contact fields, the step where matching your headers to Notes' field names determines whether data lands in the right places.

3

Handle the field mapping carefully: Notes has its own field names and the mapping screen pairs your columns to them, so verify names, emails and phone types map correctly rather than accepting defaults blindly, since a mismatched mapping puts phone numbers in the wrong slots or drops fields.

4

Verify a few imported contacts opened in Notes show their data in the right fields, and check for duplicates if the address book already held some of these contacts, resolving overlaps after the import.

When the Notes CSV import proves fussy about field mapping, an alternative is a structured import template, some Notes deployments provide a contact import template or a Lotus Notes structured text format that maps more predictably than raw CSV, worth asking your Notes administrator whether one exists. And for the reverse direction or moving contacts out of Notes later, the same CSV bridge works outbound, Notes exporting contacts to CSV that Excel and other applications read, the address book bridge running both ways.

CSV with clean headers imported through File, Import and the mapping screen let me pair everything correctly, which mattered since the defaults had put mobile numbers in the business phone field. Verified a few and fixed two duplicates. The map carefully rather than blindly warning was earned.