Does the order of my columns matter?

Not for matching — each header is looked up by name, wherever it sits. It matters in exactly one place: the ambiguous nom, nome or nombre column, which is read as a surname or a given name depending on whether a first-name or a family-name column exists elsewhere in the row. Everything else can be in any order at all.

Can one cell hold several phone numbers?

Yes — a contact can have several phones and several emails, and the export writes them into one cell. If you are building the CSV yourself, keep them in one cell too and quote it if it contains your separator. What a spreadsheet cannot do is label them, so a mobile and a landline arrive as two numbers with no indication of which is which; add the label in the destination if you need it.

What date format should the calendar columns use?

Write them the unambiguous way: 2026-09-07 for a whole day and 2026-09-07T14:00:00Z for a moment, year first. A column of 07/09/2026 is read as September in some places and July in others, and a spreadsheet will happily reformat it while you are not looking. Check one row in the .ics viewer after converting, before you import a hundred.

You Do Not Have to Rename Your Columns to English

Published 9/8/2026 · 4 min read · File tools

Daniel Okonkwo — Front-end developer and tech writer at OneKitly

Web performance · File formats

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In short

Both CSV importers read the first row and match each header against a list of names per column, in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Italian. A contacts file can therefore be headed prénom, nom de famille, société, téléphone, courriel and be understood exactly as first, last, org, phone, email would be; a calendar file can be headed titre, début, fin, lieu. Only one word causes real trouble. Nom means surname in French but nome and nombre mean the full name in Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, and no dictionary settles that from the word alone. The importer settles it from the neighbours: a nom sitting beside a prénom column is the surname, a nome sitting beside a cognome column is the given name, and an ambiguous column left on its own is treated as the whole name. Load the file and the tool lists the columns it recognised before it converts anything, which is the moment to check rather than after.

The header row is matched in six languages, so prénom, apellidos, Vorname and cognome are all understood. One header is genuinely ambiguous — nom — and it is settled by the column next to it.

The separator is guessed, not assumed

Excel writes a semicolon across continental Europe, because the comma is the decimal separator there. A reader that only knows the comma then sees a single column whose name is the entire header row — and the file is not rejected, it is misread: no column matches, and empty records are written without a word. The importer counts candidate separators outside quotes, and only on the first few lines, so that one address reading Dupont, Jean does not elect the comma on its own.

What to do when a column is not recognised

The tool says so, and it says which headers it did find, which is more useful than a silent import. Rename the header to any of the words in the table above — you do not have to pick English, only a word on the list — and reload. A contacts file needs at least one of name, first, last, email, phone or org to be recognisable at all; a calendar file needs at least one of summary, start, end or location. Columns the tool does not know are ignored rather than guessed at, so an extra column of internal reference numbers costs nothing.

The same contacts file, headed six ways, understood identically
vCard field	Headers understood
Given name	first, first name, given, forename, prénom, vorname
Family name	last, surname, family name, nom de famille, apellido(s), sobrenome, apelido, nachname, cognome
Full name	name, full name, display name, fn, nom complet, nombre completo, nome completo, vollständiger name
Organisation	org, organisation, company, société, empresa, azienda, firma
Phone	phone, tel, mobile, téléphone, teléfono, telefone, handy, telefono
Email	email, e-mail, mail, courriel, correo
Birthday	birthday, bday, anniversaire, cumpleaños, aniversário, geburtstag, compleanno

CSV to VCFBuild a vCard file your phone can import from a spreadsheet of contacts.Try the tool →

Frequently asked questions

Does the order of my columns matter?: Not for matching — each header is looked up by name, wherever it sits. It matters in exactly one place: the ambiguous nom, nome or nombre column, which is read as a surname or a given name depending on whether a first-name or a family-name column exists elsewhere in the row. Everything else can be in any order at all.
Can one cell hold several phone numbers?: Yes — a contact can have several phones and several emails, and the export writes them into one cell. If you are building the CSV yourself, keep them in one cell too and quote it if it contains your separator. What a spreadsheet cannot do is label them, so a mobile and a landline arrive as two numbers with no indication of which is which; add the label in the destination if you need it.
What date format should the calendar columns use?: Write them the unambiguous way: 2026-09-07 for a whole day and 2026-09-07T14:00:00Z for a moment, year first. A column of 07/09/2026 is read as September in some places and July in others, and a spreadsheet will happily reformat it while you are not looking. Check one row in the .ics viewer after converting, before you import a hundred.

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All guides →

How-toBuilding a Calendar From a Schedule You Already Have in a SpreadsheetCourse timetables, match fixtures, shift rotas and conference programmes all start life as a table. Four columns are enough to turn one into a file every calendar application can import.ExplainerA vCard Address Has Seven Parts, and a CSV Column Has OneNames, addresses and organisations are structured fields in a vCard. Flatten them into a spreadsheet and they read identically while losing the seams — which matters the moment you build a vCard back out of that spreadsheet.ExplainerA Recurring Event Is One Line in the CSV, Not TwelveAn .ics file stores a weekly meeting once, with a rule attached. Export it to CSV and you get a single row for the whole series — which is the file being honest, not the converter losing rows.ExplainerThe Same .ics File Can Mean Five Different TimesiCalendar writes a start time in one of three ways, and only one of them is unambiguous. A meeting written with a named zone, converted on machines in Paris, New York and Honolulu, spanned nineteen hours and changed day.ComparisonThree vCard Versions, and the Same Person in Each2.1 marks types without an equals sign, 3.0 is what everything reads, 4.0 writes some values as URIs — so a phone can arrive as tel:+33612345678, prefix included. Knowing which you have explains most import surprises.ComparisonTwo Emails in One Cell, or Two Strings in an ArrayA contact can have several phone numbers and several addresses. The CSV joins them with a middle dot into one cell; the JSON keeps them as a list, which is the difference between a script that works and one that splits on a guess.

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