Adding multiple contacts in Google Contacts at once

When the old Google Contacts UI finally made way for the new Google Contacts preview version, it took with itself one of the most used feature: the ability to add multiple contacts at once under either My Contacts or any specific contact groups, now called Labels.

In the intervening months, many hundreds of people have posted in the Gmail help community and also on Twitter about bringing back this feature, and, now (in February 2020), we finally see that feature being released and made available for the Gsuite and personal Gmail accounts.

The sequence of steps are as follows:

• Visit the Google Contacts page at https://contacts.google.com/
• Click on the "Create contact" button. It will expand to show two options, (a) Create a contact and (b) Create multiple contacts

• Click on the "Create multiple contacts" button. A pop-up window will appear with the relevant fields

• If you want to add the new contacts under a label, you need to click on the grey "No label" button to see a scrollable list of all the Contact Groups created for that account with the option to create a new contact label if required.

Click on a label of your choice to select that label for the new contacts. To create a new contact label, click on where it reads "New label", type in the new label name, then either press enter or click elsewhere.

Note: Selecting a label will make a blue check-mark appear next to the label name. However, it neither offers an Apply option nor gets rid of that scrollable list. You would need to click elsewhere on the screen to get that scrollable list to disappear, and have that selected label name displayed in blue.

• Type in or paste previously copied email addresses with or without names separated by commas and then click on the blue Create button.

If you only enter names:

If you only enter email addresses:

If you enter both details:

While pasting previously copied email addresses from a spreadsheet, you may encounter an error because the contact details are not separated by commas. 

To avoid such incidences, it is best to copy-paste the contact details in a word processing document and insert those commas before pasting them in Google Contacts or you can double on the Red label and insert those commas yourself, click elsewhere (or press the Tab key) to get the Create button enabled.