Business card scanner for CSV and vCard.

How it works

Somebody on your stand photographs a card with the CardParse app. The card is parsed into named fields, anything the parser is unsure about is flagged for a person to check rather than guessed at, and the contact appears in your dashboard.

A file. CSV opens in Excel, Numbers or Sheets; vCard imports into a phone address book.

Connecting it

Nothing to connect. The download sits on the contacts table, next to the filter.

Scanning works with no signal. Cards queue on the phone and upload themselves when the connection comes back, which matters more at a trade show than anywhere else: a hall full of people is a hall full of phones fighting over the same cell.

Automatically, or when you say so

Each destination is set to one or the other. Automatic means every card arrives within seconds of being scanned, with anything flagged for review held back until somebody confirms it. The alternative is that nothing leaves on its own: you select the contacts you want on the contacts table and press send, whenever you are ready.

Which one suits depends on the show. A stand qualifying as it goes usually wants to check before sending; a stand collecting as fast as it can usually does not.

Worth knowing

• Cells beginning with an equals sign, a plus, a minus or an at symbol are prefixed before they are written. A business card is a photograph of an object anybody can print, so text read off one is untrusted, and a spreadsheet that runs it as a formula is the oldest export bug there is.
• The download carries exactly what you can see: the same filter, the same search, and the same rule about whose contacts you are allowed to look at.
• Archived contacts stay out of it unless you ask for them.