Saving your connections periodically on LinkedIn is important. If you’re using it as your main database for leads, the last thing you want to happen is have your profile shut down for any reason and put your whole business at risk.

It is recommended you save your connections every three months.

Until recently, LinkedIn allowed downloading directly to Excel, but now only .csv and .vcf files can be downloaded. In this tutorial, I show you how to import these files nicely into Excel.

1. Go to Connections on the navigation bar and click Keep in Touch from the drop-down menu.
2. In the top right-hand corner, select the cog icon.
3. On the right you will see Advanced Settings and under it Export LinkedIn Connections.
4. You now have the option to export your connections. Select Outlook.CSV, which will automatically download to your computer’s Downloads folder.

From there,

5. Open Excel.
6. Go to Data and select Get External Data Sources.
7. Upload the file from your Downloads folder.
8. It will now give you several options. Select Delimiter as the Original Data Type and Comma as the delimiter. (This will unfold differently on different computers, but the principle is the same.)
9. It will now ask you where you want to put your data. Just click OK.

You will now have a clean Excel spreadsheet of all your leads.