How to Import Your Wedding Guest List From Contacts or CSV

How to import your wedding guest list from a spreadsheet or your phone contacts, get 300 names in without typing them, and merge both families' lists.

By Mia · 2026-07-12

You have two ways to import your wedding guest list without typing 300 names: upload a CSV with name, phone, and tag columns, or pull people straight from your phone contacts. Both families can upload their own lists into the same place, and in Cordially Wed a re-import merges by phone number, so uploading Priya's 160 names and Raj's 140 gives you one clean list of 300 rather than two spreadsheets that disagree with each other.

Get the columns right before you upload anything

Almost every failed import is a column problem, not a tool problem. Ten minutes of tidying up front will save you an hour of fixing rows afterward.

The columns worth having:

• Name. Full name in one column is fine. Avoid honorifics baked into the name field, because "Mrs. Sharma Auntie" is not a name you want printed on a place card.
• Phone number. This is the important one. Include the country code, so +14155550123 and +919820055512 rather than bare local digits. This is what identifies a guest and what your invites go to.
• Tags. One column, comma separated, holding side of the family and events. Something like "bride-side, mehndi, sangeet, reception".
• Email, optional. Useful, but on a desi guest list far fewer relatives read email than read a text.

Strip the header row of stray spaces, make sure every row has a phone number, and delete the empty rows at the bottom that spreadsheets love to keep. Save as CSV, not XLSX.

How to export your guest list out of Zola or The Knot

If you already started on Zola or The Knot, your names are not stuck there. Both let you export.

On Zola, open your Guest List, find the export or download option in the list actions, and take the CSV. On The Knot, the guest list has a similar export to spreadsheet option. Either way you get a CSV with names, addresses, and whatever RSVP state they were tracking.

What you will notice is that the export is built around one event and one RSVP. There is a single yes or no column, because that is the shape of the problem those tools solve, and they solve it well for a one-day Western wedding. There is no concept of "invited to the Sangeet but not the Haldi." So when you bring that file across, expect to do one pass adding your event tags. Delete the columns you do not need, make sure the phone column is populated (these exports are often address-heavy and phone-light, which is a problem when your invites go by text), and add your tags column. Then import.

Importing straight from your phone contacts

For a lot of your list, the phone numbers you need are already sitting in your phone. Your cousins, your college friends, the family friends you text anyway. Typing them into a spreadsheet just to upload the spreadsheet is a strange amount of work.

Contacts import lets you pick people directly from your phone's address book and add them as guests, with the number already formatted. It is the fastest way to get the first 60 or 80 people in, and it is useful early when you are still building rather than finalizing.

One caution: your contacts are messy in ways your guest list should not be. You have three entries for the same cousin, you have people saved as "Amit work" and "Dentist", and half the numbers have no country code. Pick deliberately rather than selecting everyone, and fix the country codes as you go. It is still far faster than typing.

Two families, two spreadsheets, one guest list

This is where most desi guest lists go wrong, and it has nothing to do with the software.

Priya's mother builds a list in Excel. Raj's mother builds one in Google Sheets. Both are lovingly maintained. Neither uses the same column names. Two months later you are the one manually reconciling them at midnight, and you discover that the family friend both families claim is on both lists twice with two different phone numbers.

The fix is boring and it works: agree the columns once, send both sides the same template, and upload both files into the same list. Priya's side sends 160 names, Raj's side sends 140, you import both, and you end up with one list of about 300 that everyone is looking at. Tag each guest with whose side they came from at import time, so you can still see the split, still know who owns which guest, and still tell whether one family is quietly overshooting the agreed number. One list, two views. Not two lists.

Re-imports merge by phone number, so you do not get two Priyas

The reason a guest list turns into a mess is that it is never imported once. Your mother sends an updated file. An auntie remembers eleven more people. Somebody finds the list from your cousin's wedding and suggests you cross-reference it. Every one of those is another upload, and in a plain spreadsheet every upload is a fresh duplication risk.

Cordially Wed merges on phone number. If a guest with that number already exists, the row updates them instead of creating a second copy. So you can hand your mother-in-law the template, get her file back three times over four months, and upload all three without ever ending up with two Priya Sharmas. Corrections propagate. Duplicates do not.

This is also why the phone number column matters more than anything else in your file. It is not just how the invite reaches the guest, it is the identity that keeps the list clean across every re-import. Names are not unique on a desi guest list. There are four Rahuls. There is only one of each phone number.

Tag by event and by side once, then use it forever

Once the names are in, spend one sitting tagging. Side of the family, and which functions each guest is invited to. This is the last boring hour of your guest list, and it pays for the rest of the planning.

With event tags in place, you invite the Mehndi list without touching anyone else, you send the reception invite to all 300, and every guest gets a per-event RSVP rather than a single yes or no. Your headcounts stop being a spreadsheet exercise and start being live: 218 confirmed for the reception, 96 for the Haldi, updating as replies land. That is the number your caterer wants and the number your seating chart reads from.

Cordially Wed does the import (CSV or phone contacts), the merge by phone number, the tags, and the per-event RSVPs in one place. The guest list, RSVPs, wallet passes, seating chart, and your wedding website are all free. The only paid piece is unlimited guest texting: a one-time payment from $59, sized to how many unique guest phone numbers you are texting, with no subscription. You can send yourself a free test message first, so you can see exactly what lands on a guest's phone before you pay anything. Add your first guests and send your first invites at cordiallywed.com/invite.