Get contacts listed across for your CRM

Most contact exports are long: one row per contact, with the company name repeated on every row. Fifty contacts at the same company means fifty rows. That's the right shape for most tools, but some CRM import templates want the opposite: one row per company, with the contacts listed across as numbered columns like Contact 1 name, Contact 1 phone, Contact 2 name, Contact 2 phone.

Rebuilding that layout by hand means sorting by company, copying each contact's details into new columns, and keeping track of which contact goes in which slot. For a few companies it's tedious. For a few hundred it's an afternoon, and one missed paste puts a contact on the wrong company's row.

The Group across mode on the Transpose / Unpivot tool builds this layout in one run.

You pick two things. The group column is the column whose repeated values define a group; every row that shares a value lands on the same output row. The repeating columns are the fields that vary per row, like the contact's name, phone, and email. Each row in a group becomes one numbered set in the output, in the order you picked the fields.

Nothing about the mode is specific to contacts. Group by an order number to put line items across. Group by a student to put test scores across. Group by a property to put tenants across. The example below uses contacts because CRM imports are the most common reason to need this shape.

Columns that are neither the group column nor repeating (a Website or Industry column that's the same on every row of a company) ride along from each group's first row by default. A toggle leaves them out if you only want the group column and the numbered sets.

Six steps from a long contact list to a CRM-ready layout.

The mode is deterministic, so the same file always produces the same output. Companies appear in the order they first show up in your file, not alphabetically. Within a company, contacts number in file order: the first row in the file for that company becomes contact 1, the next becomes contact 2, and so on. If contact 1 should be the primary contact, sort your file that way before running.

Sets cap at 50 per row, so the output can't grow unreasonably wide. A company with more rows than that keeps its first 50, and the results page tells you how many rows were left out.

Rows with a blank company cell aren't dropped. They group together into one row with an empty company cell, and the results page flags how many there were so you can fix the source data if that matters.

Groups with fewer contacts than the widest one get blank cells in their unused sets. The results page counts those padded cells, so blank cells in the output are expected, not a bug.