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
1) 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.
2) Enable iCloud for syncing the iPhone contacts. This is to auto sync the contacts between iPhone and a Mac.
3) 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.
4) Convert the vcf to csv using http://labs.brotherli.ch/vcfconvert/.
5) 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!
