question

Joseph Heinen avatar image
Joseph Heinen asked mary-community-moderator commented

inconsistent results trying to upload Personal Contact List via CSV?

Uploading Personal Contacts via CSV is producing wildly inconsistent results (read that as "frustrating failures...") Might there be some undocumented field specifications? I cannot get more than 10-20 records uploaded at a time, and sometimes even those few records will fail to upload. No error messages. We've utilized all the known guidance on this task -- downloading and re-using the specific file format/headers; ensuring CSV is UTF-8; ensuring no forbidden characters in names; using different file names in consecutive uploads; etc. Just trying to get 350 Personal Contacts uploaded. Any known good solutions out there, please?

contacts
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mary-community-moderator avatar image mary-community-moderator ♦♦ commented ·

Hi @Joseph Heinen. I see that you opened a case regarding this. Our Tech Support Team will help you investigate what's causing the issue.

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Joseph Heinen avatar image Joseph Heinen mary-community-moderator ♦♦ commented ·

Mary - Thanks for your note. As I was reading your note, a first level Tech Support rep (Ren) called me, so multiple RC folks are trying to help (and I certainly appreciate it). Ren duplicated the problem himself and couldn't fix it, so he will escalate to next tier TS. I'll gladly share the resolution here if it's something that an Admin must do differently.

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mary-community-moderator avatar image mary-community-moderator ♦♦ Joseph Heinen commented ·

I'm also curious to know the resolution for this. I am looking forward to hearing back from you. Thanks for the update!

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Joseph Heinen answered mary-community-moderator commented

I found a solution through another tech forum.


SUMMARY: After dozens of trials with file changes, I discovered that RingCentral uses a variant of CSV, and that version is not directly compatible with Excel for Mac. RC expects that every field entry in a CSV file is delimited with double quote marks, even blank fields. The following sample line shows what this looks like in text form for six fields where only the first two fields contain data.

“John Doe”,”123 Main St”,””,””,””,””

Using Excel for Mac, the export to CSV for the same six field values produces this result:

“John Doe”,”123 Main St”,,,,


SOLUTION: There’s an Excel custom format technique to force double quote marks in cells that do contain data. After saving a CSV version of the file, use TextEdit to find/replace all the null fields with delimited fields.

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mary-community-moderator avatar image mary-community-moderator ♦♦ commented ·

Thanks @Joseph Heinen! This is a really good information.

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