How to download your LinkedIn contacts to Excel

You should keep a backup copy of your LinkedIn contacts, and since it’s easy to do, you should do it now!

Why?

First, because LinkedIn isn’t perfect, and sometimes they lose accounts. Sometimes they decide you’re violating their rules and close your account intentionally. You really need that contact list on a local storage device just in case.

Second, you may want to use your LI contact list to send emails to your contacts. For example, I create and send quarterly newsletters (you can sign up on my home page – the grey box on the right side). While I don’t use my LinkedIn connections for this, it’s probably something I should consider.

So here’s how to do it – it’s actually pretty easy…

Log into your LinkedIn account, and click on “Contacts” in the left column. That will take you to your contacts page, and if you scroll to the bottom, you’ll see this:

When you click on the icon, you’ll get this screen:

Click on picture for larger image

You can leave it on the default – to export to Microsoft Outlook format. Save the file it creates, which will be something like: “linkedin_connections_export_microsoft_outlook.csv,” which Excel will open all nicely formatted. Because LinkedIn formats this for Outlook (you can also import it there, if you want – LinkedIn has instructions on the confirmation page shown above), there will be many columns you don’t need – so just delete them if you want everything to be neat. (Position your mouse over the column heading, right click and select “delete column.”)

Aha, what can you do with this wonderful list now that it’s on your computer?

I’ve written about using Word and Excel to do mass mailings here. Just be careful not to do too many in any session, because your email provider might tag you as a spammer…

If you’ve added notes about your contacts, LinkedIn will not download those notes.