SMS4PC supports standard address books such as Outlook, Windows, Mac and Google. But what if your contacts aren’t in one of these formats? No worries! You can copy thousands of numbers at a time from a spreadsheet or CSV file directly to SMS4PC. Send an SMS message to hundreds, or even thousands, of users with just a few clicks.
What is a CSV?
A CSV, or comma separated values file, is simply a simplified spreadsheet, which can be opened by most spreadsheet applications. Many times, a CSV file has less formatting than an Excel file would allow, but the information is still in rows and columns. Because it is easy to convert text or data strings into CSV files, many vendors and data warehouses offer users the ability to export data into CSV. If you utilize these types of services, you may receive phone number lists in CSV format.
How to import contacts from a CSV file into the SMS application
In order to import a list of phone numbers and contacts, ensure the list is in a CSV file. You simply go to “Contacts”, “Import contacts” and select the CSV file you want to import the contacts from. After choosing the appropriate columns to import you can also define a group where the contacts and numbers shall end up.
How to Copy Phone Numbers into SMS4PC
In order to copy a list of phone numbers, ensure the list is in a spreadsheet file. If you can open the file in Excel or Open Office’s spreadsheet program, then you can copy the numbers to SMS4PC.
Once you have the data opened in a spreadsheet, identify the numbers you want to copy over. It will be easiest to do this if all the numbers are grouped together.
Put your mouse cursor over the cell with the first number. Left click and hold while you drag the mouse to cover all numbers you want to copy. Once all desired numbers are highlighted, release the left click. Right click and select copy, or use the keyboard shortcut Control-C for copy.
Go to SMS4PC and open a new message. Click in the “To” box. Use the shortcut Control-V for paste. You will note that the numbers you copied are now loaded into the SMS message. Enter the text for your message and click send.
To see more information about how to copy/paste contacts from a spreadsheet into the SMS4PC application see this video
Ever since man lived in caves communication has been the primary tool for survival. This is still true today. But today survival communication takes place not only between people but even more so between people and organizations, and companies between companies. Communication and information has become the most important modern day tool for companies that want to survive and stand out from the crowd.
When the telephone was invented over a 130 year ago (by Graham Bell), it was not long before it changed the whole world economy. It was now easy to pick up the phone and talk to people that it would have taken weeks to reach by mail before. Business agreements, mergers, economic information and relations were maintained and strengthened by the telephone.
In today’s society, the choices of tools for communication are many. Besides the standard telephone you have the internet, e-mail, mobile communication, social media and some companies actually still use the fax machine. The constant information flow seems, at first glance, to be exclusively positive, but as we in an evolutionary aspect still “live in caves”, we can only process so much information at once. So, people invented ways to protect and streamline the information overflow with e-mail filters, voicemail and RSS-feeds that let us choose what information we read and process. The rules of engagement have changed, as it has become more and more important for companies to be present where the consumer chooses to be, and not the other way around.
This can be tricky for companies that want to reach out. Making fantastic websites or eye catching videos on YouTube, fun Facebook pages and exclusive e-mail marketing send outs just doesn’t seem to be very effective in many cases, and many companies struggle with their primary tool for survival – communication. Everybody is on the internet, everybody have the possibility to make beautiful marketing almost cost free, and the clutter is making it hard for both information consumers and companies to reach their target groups.
According to many recent studies the fastest increasing tool for getting in touch is the mobile phone communication. You might think that it means iPhone or Android, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube on the mobile, but actually it is SMS. SMS is regarded as the single most personal way to get in touch with someone, and the most reliable tool of all. People trust the SMS, as it is – personal. The reason why the SMS is still so popular is that it can be described as a “permission based” form of marketing, which means that before a company sends a text message to you, you must have initiated the relationship by opting in to receiving the information from that company. This simple fact creates trust – opting in is what we want people to do.
The conclusion is that the more personal communication gets, the more impact it has. And today, SMS text messaging is the closest you can get to face-to-face communication. As a company looking for ways to break through the information clutter – SMS is your best bet.
SMS4PC now works on latest version of Microsoft Outlook, i.e. Outlook 2010.
To get started simply go to our download page and download the Outlook plugin. This one will work very well with Outlook 2010 and also older versions.
If you have a previous version of our SMS plugin you should remove/de-install the current application in a standard Windows manner and then go to the download page and install the latest version of Outlook 2010 plugin.
… And why to send SMS text messages from a PC (i.e. the business case and benefits)
It is fairly simple for most people to get started sending SMS text messages from a PC.
First thing to do is go to our website and go to the section Try for free and choose either to downoad a small client application or to use the web based SMS interface. As client applications we offer both plugins to Microsoft Outlook and standalone desktop apps.
Second thing to do (after sending some free test messages) is to go to our Buy credits page where a user can buy anything from 100 text messages up to 10,000 text messages. These messages can be used anytime the coming 12 months. The more you buy the more discount you get as well. Prices can be found on the Pricing page.
Third thing to do is to start using the SMS service for your business needs. Both inside the applications and on the web page for sending SMS you can see the number of remaining SMS credits you have.
The last weeks we have got many new business customers starting to use the desktop SMs service. Many of these customers use the app for
* Work orders – i.e. instructions to a mobile work force
* Notifications – for example delivery notifications to customers for example
At the moment we are experiencing some serious bugs in our standalone desktop application and therefore some outage. We apologize for that so much and I promise you that we are working at full speed in order to fix it.
Meanwhile we suggest you to use our web-based application for sending SMS. That app has most of the core functions the standalone app has and of course you can use the same account as you have and the same mobile number you have registered to SMS4PC.
UPDATED: Connection issue is fixed
If you have any questions please email us at support AT sms4pc.com
We are currently launching some new apps with some improvements and bug fixing implemented. However, we want to make you aware of one bug and how to work around it while we are fixing it.
The bug is around importing a bunch of contacts from a .CSV file. That doesn’t work as of now and we apologize for that. However, a very good workaround is to copy/paste numbers from an excel spreadsheet, CSV or other format. Simply mark the area of numbers you want to send a SMS message to and paste it into the TO field and you are ready to send an SMS campaign in less than one minute.
Quite many enterprises and organizations have asked us the last months about why you “need” to have contacts in our apps. Why can you not only upload a list of numbers and send them as a “campaign in a few moments?
Based on this feedback we have created something we call “Quickgroups” which is the quickest and simplest way to send a message or campaign to a bunch of people. What you do is simply copy/paste numbers from spreadsheets, CSV files, .txt files into the applications such as our standalone desktop app or our web app.
In the video below I show you how I copy 1,000 mobile phone numbers from a spreadsheet I have and paste it into our SMS app on my Mac and send out this campaign in less than one minute!
Send 1,000 SMS text messages in less than one minute
Give it a try and let us know what you think of it!
We now officially offer a web services API for developers and enterprises. The API is very simple to use and some examples of users who could use the API is:
Enterprise IT departments wanting to connect their own systems (databases, CRM systems, etc.) to the messaging network.
Application developers producing their own messaging clients or adding messaging into their existing applications.
The web API consists of HTTP POST requests with an XML payload. The responses are returned back in the same format.
The API enables:
Sending SMS.
Tracking the delivery status of a message for each recipient.
Scheduling messages to be sent in the future.
Getting history of all sent messages
Let us know your comments about the API, what you like, any functions you miss etc. We love your feedback and also we look forward to receive some notes about what kind of application development you do and how you use the API.
