Import Nokia SMS and Contacts CSV Export to Google Excel Spreadsheet

Submitted by tomo on March 25, 2011 - 5:03am

Using Nokia's PC Suite, one can export SMS messages from one's phone (maybe only their smartphones with USB). The format is CSV but the output is basically unreadable due to PC Suite bugs. Only a phone number is exported per message, no contact name. But more importantly, the CSV output is broken -- double quotes aren't properly escaped.

I think it's useful to be able to browse old messages online, say in a Google spreadsheet. But to do that, we need to rewrite PC Suite's output a bit.

[I didn't know anything about scripting Excel (or Google's spreadsheet which is basically Excel) but I did want to look up some old messages because I couldn't remember somebody's birthday. After importing messages from a year ago to Google docs, I could read messages between my friend and I around that day to find out exactly.]

First, export your messages. If your phone has a strict limit of stored messages, or gets really slow after a few hundred messages, then you should be doing this regularly. Also, export your contacts to CSV.

Then, run this script on each SMS CSV file:
[Update: I rewrote this in Javascript which you can use directly at the bottom]

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys
for line in sys.stdin:
    line = line.replace('\r', '').replace('\n', '')
    x = line.split(',')
    x[7] = x[7][1:]
    x[-1] = x[-1][:-1]
    print ','.join(x[:7]) + ',"' + ','.join([y.replace('"', '""') for y in x[7:]]) + '"'

E.g. save that as fix.py, then run:

./fix.py < exported-inbox.csv > fixed-inbox.csv

Now open up a new Google Docs spreadsheet and import fixed-inbox.csv as a sheet, and your exported contacts as another sheet.

In your contacts sheet, add a new column before the first column and populate it as a function:
=EXPAND(RIGHT(O1:O2, 7))"
You can then drag all the way down, so that each row of that column has that expression, with appropriate row numbers. This creates an index of the most significant numbers of a phone number (my Vietnamese phone numbers are a mix of +84... and 09..., this normalizes them). It's important that this column is to the left of your contacts' names.

Now in the sms export sheet, add a column, say column D after the number, which is column C. Use this expression:
=VLOOKUP(RIGHT(C1, 7),contacts!A:B, 2, FALSE)
What this does is use the "contacts" sheet's A column as an index column to lookup, and we again normalize the phone number in column C (right-most 7 digits) to print out the name in column B of contacts.

And Voila! You have contact names next to each message.

Below is a JS snippet that will fix your Nokia PC Suite exported csv files.



Click this link to transform the pasted text into the box below:
Fix CSV

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This is really great, i have looked for this information literally for years haha

btw i can't use the java script snippet where you paste the csv file, I tried to copy the csv file from windows explorer then right click and paste it in the box, nothing happens.. please enlighten me

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