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Contacts Bulk Upload: Phone Numbers With Added Zeros or Cut Off (Why and How to Fix)

The bulk upload feature on the Contacts page offers an easy way to add many contacts to the engageSPARK platform. However, at times after bulk upload completes the numbers look something like this: “855884000000” or very short like this “85588411”. What’s going on?

Here’s what happened

Very likely, you were working with long phone numbers (12+ digits), had these stored in a .csv file, and then opened and saved this file in Excel. At that point, numbers in Excel looked something like this: “8.55884E+11″, i.e. were formatted in scientific number format. Clicking Save is the problem; it causes Excel to save the scientific notation as actual text, so a number like 855884123456 actually becomes “8.55884E+11” – it’s not that the number is displayed like that; it actually gets saved like that. Then, when uploaded to our platform, the number will get saved as 85588411, with the “E+” being stripped away automatically.

If you then open that corrupted file again and save it as an XLSX file, then the number gets saved as “85588400000”, which is also broken but in a different way.

Yes, Excel makes a mess of phone numbers in .csv files. Fortunately, the fix is quick and easy.

How to resolve the issue

Follow these steps to upload your phone numbers successfully:

  1. Open the original .csv file in Excel
  2. Save it as an .xlsx file right away
  3. Now you can make any changes you want.
  4. Upload to the engageSPARK platform.

Note that the numbers will still appear as scientific notation (with the “E+” in them), but now that is only how they are displayed; the full number is still stored in the file. That means uploading the .xlsx to the engageSPARK platform is fine and the full correct number will be saved.

Displaying the phone numbers correctly in Excel

If you want to see the full numbers in Excel, follow these steps:

  1. Highlight the column with the phone numbers.
  2. Right click on any cell in the column and choose Format cells:
  3. In the window that appears, click Custom in the left pane, then 0 in the Type menu on the right and click Ok:
  4. The numbers will now all appear correctly as the full numbers:

Have questions or need a little extra help?