Upload Your Address Book

Having to recreate an address book of contacts in FOB can be a pain, or at least seem it – just another job you don’t need, but with our templates its very simple for anybody comfortable with .xls and .csv files.  Here’s a guide on how to do it.

But first lets explain why FOB doesn’t offer a tool for you to do this:

  1. Most people don’t want to upload their entire contacts list – family, friends, defunct records etc.
  2. Most people don’t keep their address book in the sort of shape FOB needs the data.  This might be a light weight app but it’s still corporate data with quality information.
  3. FOB is a shared address book – a consolidation of multiple address books.

The Upload Process

  1. Export your existing address book to a .csv file (Outlook, Gmail etc. have simple tools for this.  Apple Mail requires a third party program such as Address Book Exporter
  2. Open the export file with Excel or Google Spreadsheets and manipulate as appropriate – deleting, modifying records.
  3. Download the FOB Company and People templates from the Address Book Sidebar or our Download Center and open these with the spreadsheet software
  4. Copy/Paste the data you want from the Excel file to the templates and save to desktop as .csv files.
  5. In FOB Address Book use the Import Contacts tool to upload the .csv files.
  6. This process can be repeated as often as appropriate but consolidation between two or more external address books is probably best done on the desk top before upload – it’s easier to manage the errors and duplications.

Fields in the Templates

Companies – Name, Group, Website, Phone, Tags, Line 1, Line 2, City, State, Country, Zip

People – Salutation, First Name, Last Name, Company, Tags, Title, Email, Phone Number, Notes

These fields cannot be modified by the user.  Whatever goes in to any column will end up in that field in the database.

FYI Notes

We want to provide you with a corporate quality end to end business process, with all the data in the right places. At the same time, we want to give you control over how much of that data you need, so this leaves some room for accommodating individual company requirements.

Here are some notes which will help the user exploit the functionality:

  • The only mandatory field in the Company template is “Company”
  • The only mandatory fields in the People template are First Name and Last Name – (if your current system only keeps these in one field you might choose to work around this requirements by putting an extra character in the first name field e.g ! or : and copy/paste both first and last names into the Last Name field in the template.
  • The “Group” field in the company template isn’t used by FOB for anything- it’s just a another text field.
  • The tags columns can take multiple tags e.g. North-West Distribution John_Smith Prospect.  NB Tags are separated by spaces, multiple word Tags need to be joined as in real_estate.
  • Companies don’t require People, and People don’t require Companies, they can exist independently.
  • Opportunity Management requires Companies.
  • Webrequest requires People with email addresses.
  • On import the people template the program looks to see if the company in the people record already exists.  It attaches the person to the pre-exisiting company record, provided the the two company names are exactly the same.  Where the company name in the people record doesn’t already exist, the import will create a new company record e.g.  ABC Inc in the company import and ABC, Inc in the people import will create two companies.
  • The import programs will work on large numbers of address book records and can import them quickly.  However please be aware slow Internet connections can make it look as if the app has run into a problem.  Best advice is talk to us first if you want to import more than 1,500 records in one go.