Free vCard generator

What is a vCard (.vcf)?

A vCard is a small plain-text file that carries a person’s contact details in structured, typed form. Not “a name and some numbers”, but a family name that is labelled as a family name and a phone number that is labelled as a mobile — which is what lets an address book file it correctly instead of guessing. The extension.vcf stands for Virtual Contact File.

It is an open standard, not a vendor format, which is why iPhone, Android, Outlook, macOS Contacts and Google Contacts all open one natively. vCard 3.0 is specified in RFC 2426 (1998); vCard 4.0 in RFC 6350 (2011); and vCard 2.1, from 1996, still surfaces in exports from older phones and mail clients. Versions 2.1 and 3.0 are the widely supported ones. 4.0 is the tidier specification — UTF-8 is mandatory and phone numbers are proper tel: URIs — but support for it is thinner in older software.

The generator above writes vCard 3.0. That is the deliberate choice for a file you hand to someone whose software you know nothing about: nothing made this century chokes on it.

The anatomy is simple. Each card is a block that opens with BEGIN:VCARD, declares its VERSION, lists one property per line asNAME;PARAMETER=VALUE:content, and closes withEND:VCARD. Lines end with a carriage return and line feed. A single file can hold hundreds of these blocks stacked one after another — that is how a full address-book export travels as one .vcf. Here is a complete, valid card:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
N:Chen;Mei;;;
FN:Mei Chen
ORG:Acme Ltd
TITLE:Sales Director
TEL;TYPE=CELL:+852 9123 4567
EMAIL;TYPE=INTERNET:mei@acme.com
END:VCARD

vCard field reference

These are the properties you will actually meet. Everything is optional exceptFN — and, in vCard 3.0, N.

The form above writes FN, N,ORG, TITLE, twoTEL lines, EMAIL andURL. The rest are listed so you can recognise them in files other tools hand you — and because a .vcf is plain text, you can open the download in any editor and add a NOTE orADR line yourself.

N versus FN, and the semicolons

This is the single most confusing thing about the format, and the cause of most botched imports. The two name properties are not alternatives — a correct card has both.FN is the formatted name: one flat string, exactly as it should be displayed. N is the structured name, broken into five components in a fixed order, separated by semicolons:

N:family;given;additional;prefix;suffix

N:Chen;Mei;;;              → Mei Chen
N:Chen;Mei;;Dr.;PhD        → Dr. Mei Chen, PhD
FN:Dr. Mei Chen, PhD

Two rules follow from that. First, empty components still need their semicolons: a name with no middle name, prefix or suffix ends in;;;, not nothing. Second, some address books readN and ignore FN — so a card carrying only a display name imports with a blank name. Write both, always.

ADR uses the same component trick with seven parts — PO box, extended address, street, locality, region, postal code, country — and the first two are conventionally left empty. ORG takes up to three: company, division, department.

Because semicolons and commas are separators, a literal one inside a value has to be escaped with a backslash — ORG:Acme\, Ltd — or the importer will read it as a new component. The generator above does that escaping for you; a text editor will not.

How to import a .vcf file

Menu wording moves between versions and, on Android, between manufacturers. What follows is the route that keeps working; if a label reads slightly differently on your device, you are still in the right place.

Troubleshooting a vCard that won’t import cleanly

Five failures account for nearly every support thread about .vcf files. All five are diagnosable by opening the file in a text editor and reading it.

vCard or CSV — which should you use?

The rule is short: use vCard when the destination is a contacts app— a phone, a “save contact” button, a faithful backup — because vCard keeps the structure and the types, so a mobile number arrives labelled as a mobile.Use CSV when the destination is a grid — Excel, Google Sheets, a CRM import screen — because those want rows and columns, and a human can eyeball and edit them.

The trade-off is that CSV has no standard for what the columns mean, which is why import screens make you map “Column F” to something; and vCard is close to unreadable in a spreadsheet, because it is a card per record rather than a table. The long version, including how Google Contacts CSV differs from a plain one, is in the format guide.

What about a whole stack of cards?

This tool makes one card at a time — it is a form, and typing forty of them is not a plan. If what you actually have is a rubber-banded stack of paper cards from a trade show,BizCardPro.AI is built for that end of the problem: photograph the cards, including several in one shot, and it reads them — Japanese, Chinese and Korean cards included, with native script and romanization kept side by side — then exports the whole batch as vCard or CSV. It runs in the browser as a web app, and the features pagelists what it extracts. Same file format as the one above, just without the typing.