I have a dump of contacts from a different program, it started life as an Excel (old 2003 format xls) file. I need to massage this data to work in modern mail programs, the eventual target is ...

Looking to use Google contacts in Excel? You'll need do some exporting and importing then. Don't worry, the process is easier than you think.

If you want to let your Google Apps users import emails and contacts into Gmail, here are the steps to follow: Sign in to the Google Apps administrator control panel.