Facebook Programming tricks

Export Your Facebook Friend List to an Excel File

Facebook no more supports exporting the friend list to either CSV or Excel format. You can only export your friend's Birthdays from Facebook. For various reasons you may want to export your friend list to Excel. One reason is, you may wish to keep a copy of the contact information for your reference purpose. You may also need to insert your Facebook friend list in other social network.

Although there is no direct approach to do this, you can do it through Yahoo. Yahoo can extract all your friend list from Facebook to its contact list and later you can export it to your computer.

How to do it ?

  • Login to Yahoo mail and go to contacts
  • Click on import and then click on Facebook
  • Then import your Facebook friend lists
  • Up to here everything will go smooth. All the contact information will be inserted into your yahoo contacts
  • But when you will go to export those information, then the problem occurs.
  • It seems that Yahoo also does not support exporting the contact list of Facebook. Although there is an option to export but it results a blank CSV file.
  • The only thing you can do is, displaying the contact information on a page.

Generate CSV file

Well. I have made a script using which you can generate the CSV file. Just you need to do the following steps.

  • Go to All Contacts in Yahoo and click on Select All.
  • Go to Action–>Print All (If the print dialog appears, close it)
  • The Print Preference page will appear
  • Select the layout as Basic View and click on display printing.
  • Click the Live Demo button present below to open the app.
  • Now copy all the friend list and paste it in the box. Make sure that you are not copying any unnecessary information. If anything unnecessary then please remove it. In the webpage all the data will be in a tabular format, but after pasting it in the box, you can see only one data per line. Don't worry about blank lines, it is our duty to remove.

Now you can copy and paste the generated CSV in a notepad and save it as .csv format.

You may also like to see – How to import Facebook contacts in Gmail.

11 thoughts on “Export Your Facebook Friend List to an Excel File”

  1. Did not work exactly like it states above for me. I could not import to gmail as the .csv was not recognized. All I did extra was export yahoo contacts to .csv (Which obviously exports a blank .csv) then I highlighted and copied the name and email of the .csv I had created above to their corresponding columns in the new yahoo .csv, saved and then imported it to gmail. Worked! Thanks for the tutorial and the script!

    1. Take those name and Email and paste it in the textarea present in the article. It will convert them to csv. Now copy them to a notepad and save as csv.

  2. Thanks for the tutorial. Was having a hard time after pulling all the contacts from Facebook. Keep on writing 🙂

  3. Thanks for your help! It definitely took a bit of combing through to delete names that didn’t have an email in FB but once I got it set up all I had to do was add the words “name” and “email” in column A and B of the saved CSV version.

  4. Briliant idea….the inovative way. Would you like to give me a permission to share your article …i plan translate your article in my native language (indonesia) on my web. Thank you before…you have solved my problem….it’s waste time to copy one by one from fb contact to gmail.

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