What’s Fixed
Mapping a Phone Type column during a contact import is supposed to put that type on the phone number it creates. Two things stopped that from being reliable, and both showed up during large database migrations where the same contacts appear in more than one file.
Types were being narrowed on the way in. The importer only recognised Mobile, Home, Work and Fax. Every other value — including Other, Main, Support, Sales and Toll Free, all of which you can set by hand on a contact — was silently rewritten to Mobile. A row that clearly said “Other” produced a number labelled as a cell phone.
On contacts already in your account, the type was dropped. When the number in the file was already on the contact, the importer left the existing phone completely untouched, mapped Phone Type column and all. Worse, it only recognised the number as a duplicate when the file wrote it in exactly the stored format — a number written as (555) 123-4567 looked like a new number, failed to save as a duplicate, and the type went nowhere. Where the existing phone had no type recorded, the contact then displayed Other, which is what made a correctly mapped “home” column look like it had been ignored.
Bug Fixes
- Every phone type the app can store now imports as itself: Mobile, Work, Home, Main, Support, Sales, Fax, Toll Free and Other. Casing and spacing don’t matter, and common variants (
cell,landline,residence,office,business,toll-free) still map to the right type. - A value the importer genuinely doesn’t recognise now lands as Other instead of Mobile. Your file never said the number was a cell phone, so it no longer claims that.
- When the number is already on the contact, a missing phone type is now filled in from the file — including when the file writes the number in a display format like
(555) 123-4567. - A phone type recorded as Main, Support, Sales or Toll Free now displays under its own name on the contact instead of being labelled Other.
Contacts you imported before this fix
- If the phone shows no type at all — the contacts that were displaying Other — re-running the same import now fills the type in from your file. No cleanup by hand is needed for those.
- If the old behaviour already labelled the phone Mobile, a re-import will not change it, because a type that is already set is never overwritten. Those numbers need their type corrected on the contact.
What has not changed
- A phone type you have already set is never overwritten by an import. If a number on the contact is marked Work and a later file says Home, it stays Work — a re-import fills gaps, it doesn’t overrule decisions you’ve made in the app.
- An empty Phone Type cell still defaults to Mobile, exactly as before.
- Imports still never add a phone number the contact already has.