1392059 - Import contacts from CSV into address book should use first row to match fields

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 95087

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[Thomas Stein]

Attachment: 2286865.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; rv:11.0) like Gecko

Steps to reproduce:

I tested the import of contacts from a CSV file into TBs address book.

Therefore I created a super simple CSV test file with the following content:

Last Name,Display Name,Primary Email,Custom 1,Notes
mylastname,mydisplayname,[e-mail],mycustom,mynotes

Now I started the import process into TB.

When I came to the step after csv file selection the import Address Book dialog pops up (see the following (attached) snapshot:

http://www.picfront.org/d/9AUV?language=en

Much to my surprise Thunderbird does NOT recognize the first line as a column description although I ticked the checkbox "First record contains field names".

Why?

I tried the CSV file in UTF-8 and in ANSI encoding (does this matter?). But the non-detection of field names persist.

What else can I do to let TB recognize successfully the field names?


Actual results:

See above


Expected results:

TB should succcessfully recognize and match all corresponding columns from the first line of the import-csv contact file without manual interaction/help of the user

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Yes, that import is a pain, and no, we don't interpret the first line.

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

OMG!!!

Geoff, how hard would it be to be to do the following?

• When "First record contains field names" is checked: automatically pre-match field names between the first row and the import target fields?

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

The poor design/UX of the text file import dialog has been on record for two decades... It's so bad that to this day (see bug 1687543), users are entirely failing to understand how this works. In addition, the actual import currently fails with an error. Am trying to sort this out. Any help and hands-on gradual improvements will be welcome.

See meta bug 95087 - [Meta] Improve UX of Address book import of CSV text file: Assigning source to target fields is too difficult, wrong by design and hard to discover - improve field matching etc.