Anatomy of a contact card
A vCard is a plain-text record bracketed by BEGIN:VCARD and END:VCARD, with one property per line. The structured name lives in an N property split into surname, given name and so on, while FN holds the display name; TEL, EMAIL and ADR hold numbers, addresses and postal details, each able to carry type parameters such as “home”, “work” or “cell”. Photos can be embedded as base64 or referenced by URL, and fields like ORG, TITLE and BDAY round out a professional or personal card.
Because each contact is its own BEGIN and END block, a single .vcf file can concatenate an entire address book. This is exactly what happens when you export contacts from a phone: you receive one file containing every entry, ready to import elsewhere.
Three versions, real differences
The version matters more than people expect. vCard 2.1 is old and uses quoted-printable encoding for non-ASCII text; 3.0 became the long-time de facto standard and is what many systems still emit; 4.0 (RFC 6350) modernises the model, refines how types and preferences are expressed, and changes how some properties are structured. A card written for one version is not always read perfectly by software expecting another, which is why an exported file occasionally loses a label or mangles a special character.
When moving contacts between an old phone and a new service, version mismatches are the usual culprit behind missing fields. Knowing which version your source produced makes those gaps far easier to diagnose.
Strengths
- A genuinely universal standard that virtually every phone and address book can read.
- Plain text and self-contained, so a single file can back up an entire contact list.
- Rich field set covering multiple numbers, emails, addresses, photos and organisations.
- Can embed photos and structured names rather than just a flat list.
Limitations
- Versions 2.1, 3.0 and 4.0 differ enough to cause field loss between systems.
- Multiple values per contact make the format awkward to view as a simple table.
- Character-encoding quirks in older cards can corrupt accented names.
- Embedded photos can bloat files and are sometimes dropped on import.
When to use vCard
Use VCF whenever you need to move or back up contacts between phones, email clients or address books — it is the format those tools expect. To review or bulk-edit contacts, converting to a spreadsheet first is usually easier.
vCard FAQ
- How do I open a VCF file?
- Most phones and email clients open a vCard directly and offer to add the contacts. To read or edit it on a computer, convert it to CSV or XLSX; Morphr does this in your browser without uploading the file.
- How do I import contacts from a vCard into a spreadsheet?
- Convert the VCF to CSV or XLSX so each contact becomes a row. Where a contact has several numbers or emails, those values spread across separate columns, which makes bulk editing straightforward.
- What is the difference between vCard 2.1, 3.0 and 4.0?
- They are successive versions of the same standard with different encodings and property rules. 3.0 is the most widely supported in practice, while 4.0 (RFC 6350) is the current specification, and mismatches between them are the common reason fields go missing on import.