Export Your LinkedIn Connections to Excel or CSV, Step by Step

You can export your LinkedIn connections to Excel with LinkedIn’s own download. Go to Me, Settings & Privacy, Data privacy, then Get a copy of your data, and request the archive that includes connections. LinkedIn emails you a link, and the file inside, Connections.csv, opens in Excel. It’s free, it’s permitted, and it takes a few minutes of your time. This guide walks through it, explains why most emails are missing, and shows how to reach people the export can’t. For people outside your network, LeadTrapper’s LinkedIn scraper covers the gap.

Download Your Connections

These are the steps from LinkedIn’s help centre, on desktop:

1. Click Me at the top of your LinkedIn homepage.
2. Choose Settings & Privacy.
3. Click Data privacy on the left.
4. Under the section about how LinkedIn uses your data, click Get a copy of your data.
5. Select the archive that includes connections, or tick Connections if you only want that.
6. Click Request archive and enter your password if asked.
7. Wait for LinkedIn’s email, then download the ZIP from the link in it while you’re signed in.

Users report the connections file arriving within minutes, and the full archive taking up to a day. Unzip the download and look for Connections.csv.

What Connections.csv Contains

The file has one row per 1st-degree connection. In recent exports the columns typically are:

The first rows of the file can be a short note from LinkedIn rather than data. If Excel shows text in the first few lines, delete those rows so the column names sit in row 1.

Why Most Emails Are Missing

LinkedIn includes a connection’s email in your export only if that person allowed their connections to see or download it. Many people never turn that on, so in most exports the email column is mostly empty. That’s by design: each member decides who gets their address.

You may still see some emails on individual profiles under Contact info, because seeing an email and downloading it are separate settings. For the rest, the company route works: take the Company column, find each company’s website, and look for the person’s published address. Our guide to finding an email from a LinkedIn profile covers it, and LeadTrapper’s Email Finder reads up to 1,000 company websites per run and labels each email by person, department, branch or general inbox.

Opening It in Excel Without Broken Names

Double-clicking a CSV sometimes turns “José” or “Müller” into strange symbols, because Excel guesses the wrong character set. LinkedIn also says its CSV export doesn’t support every alphabet, so names in scripts such as Chinese, Japanese or Hebrew may not come through at all. For the rest, import instead of opening:

1. Open a blank workbook in Excel.
2. Go to Data, then From Text/CSV, and pick Connections.csv.
3. Set File Origin to 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) and click Load.

Google Sheets reads the file correctly with File, Import, Upload.

Turning the Export Into a Useful List

A raw export is a list of everyone you ever accepted. A few minutes of sorting makes it a prospect list:

• Filter by Position for the roles you sell to.
• Filter by Company to group people at the same account.
• Sort by Connected On to find recent connections, who remember you best.
• Add a Status column: contacted, replied, not now.

For connections whose role changed since you connected, LeadTrapper’s Profile Scraper reads profile links you paste, one per line, and returns each profile’s current name, headline and location. Paste the URL column in and you have up-to-date titles.

People Beyond Your Connections

The export stops at your network. To list the people you don’t know yet, you have two routes:

LeadTrapper’s Profile Search builds a search such as site:linkedin.com/in "Head of Procurement" Riyadh, collects the profile links search engines return, and reads each profile into a list you export as CSV. Searching through search engines means the discovery step doesn’t use your LinkedIn account. Reading the profile pages is still collecting LinkedIn data with software, which LinkedIn’s terms forbid, as does LinkedIn allow scraping explains. The search method itself is in our LinkedIn X-ray search guide, and the tool in our LinkedIn profile scraper guide. This isn’t legal advice.