Importing your contacts

When you're first starting out in MyConstruct importing all of your contacts can be rather daunting and confusing.

Of course you can just start by manually entering them as you need, since MyConstruct will allow you to create a contact from anywhere in the system via the 'create' menu in the top right of the screen, though generally we already have all of our contacts saved somewhere that can be exported.

In this article we are going to cover how to export all of your contacts from Outlook and then import them to MyConstruct via a CSV file and the contact importing system. The same principles can also be applied to other software such as your phone contacts or another email provider as CSV is a very common file format.

Most mobile phones will synchronize your contacts to outlook / your mail client too, so starting there is a good source for updated contacts.

First up we need to open Outlook and then navigate to the top left "File" menu, which brings you to the screen with "Open & Export", select this option and then choose "Import/Export"

Now you just have to follow the wizard which is fairly straight forward!

Select the Export to file option, then click next

Choose the Comma Separated Values option, the click next

Scroll through the list of folders and select the Contacts option, click next

Find somewhere to save the file that you'll remember, I've chosen the desktop

Finally Outlook will ask for the fields you require, you can simple leave this as the default covers everything we'll need. Finally click on Finish, now we have our contacts in a CSV file ready to import!

Now you have your contacts as a CSV the next step is to click on the "Manage Import" option in the "Contacts" menu, or you can also click the small import icon within your manage contacts page:

This brings us to the MyConstruct importing tool, all you need to do is select the type of import, for this example the "Supplier" option would work better as it's more likely we store our leads or clients elsewhere, otherwise you can simply open up your CSV file in Excel and split it into separate files for importing clients / suppliers.

Once you've uploaded your CSV file the MyConstruct wizard will step you through the rest of the process and help check all the data integrity / required fields as you go.

Check out the video showing how the Import Wizard works here