After attending an exhibition, I ended up with 50 business cards! Here comes a problem.
All (or most) of them are good contacts that I would like to save to a spreadsheet. And so I searched for an app/service that can help me. I ended up with shoeboxed, with is probably good, but cost $0.20 a card. Not satisfied, I looked around for a free solution.. My conclusion is that it is either paid, or not good.
However, I come up with my own quick & free solution, using a couple of free technologies :)
Steps to digitize all your business cards
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Use CardMunch to scan all the namecards with an iPhone. Also go to iPhone Settings > CardMunch > and enable contacts auto save. As each namecard is scanned and processed (takes a couple of minutes), they will be automatically saved to the iPhone.
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Enable iCloud for syncing the iPhone contacts. This is to auto sync the contacts between iPhone and a Mac.
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Open Mac Address Book and search for “Scanned on…”. This will filter the contacts that were added by CardMunch! Select these contacts and export in vcf.
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Convert the vcf to csv using http://labs.brotherli.ch/vcfconvert/.
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Open the csv file with Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheet!
You may also clean up your iPhone contacts by deleting away those contacts from Mac Address Book :)
This is the power of CardMunch and iCloud!
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