It took a while for me to get this video posted because I had to have part of the video blurred out for privacy.
You might remember that our Focus Friday sessions, which are 10 minutes of training focused on one particular thing (and then as much time as we need to answer all of your questions) has morphed into a “getting started on JibberJobber” video series. The next logical video was how to export contacts from LinkedIn.
You can sign up to get weekly invitations (links) to join us on each Focus Friday webinar here. You can also watch archived Focus Friday recordings here. Note that if you scroll from the bottom up, you’ll see, in order, the getting started videos! In other words, since I started recording these, I have planned them for newbies, in an order that makes sense to get up and running on JibberJobber.
Jason, When I export, I get a spreadsheet with the info, but they are in all these ” “” brackets. How do I get rid of them?
When you export, which file type are you choosing to export to? Also, are you on a mac?
yes, I’m on a mac
From the dropdown, which file type are you choosing to export to?
I used the Microsoft Office CSV because I have Microsoft Office for Mac on my computer with Excel, etc.
Try any of the others. Since you are on a mac you might consider the Mac vcf (second from top). Also, make sure the file you download is not a txt file… for some reason it looks like Safari on a Mac will not save as a .csv file, but a csv.txt file (in which case you simply remove .txt).
I tried the vcf which just creates a whole bunch of cards in my address book. Then I tried to save the txt file as an xls file, but I get a spreadsheet with the words but full of “”” “”” . This happened to me before too. I thought it was too much work to clean it all ( I have over 700 contacts) so I just have been going through them individually which is not fun!
Darn… sorry. I would reach out to LinkedIn’s tech/customer support and ask them.
Oh, I meant to say when I tried one of the other formats (csv) it came out as a .txt file too.
OK, thanks.
Jason – I think I got it. I had to google data clean up tricks.
1) find and replace ” with a space. (do it for the whole spreadsheet)
and 2) convert txt to data columns. (do it for each column.
Thanks for the follow-up on this. I wish LinkedIn would get this cleaned up so you don’t have to do the extra steps.
I could get the names and emails, but I’m not sure what happens to the company information once I do those two steps.
– I took some statistics classes where we had to pull data and export to excel. There is some trick to taking all the brackets out I just wish I could remember what it was.
Find and replace sounds good. I’m sure there are some online tools that will do that to a csv file, also.
Many times, when I need to scrub a csv file, I’ll do it in notepad, then open again in Excel.
Again, sorry I don’t have a better answer. I doubt LI will fix anytime soon, it’s been like this for years and years.