Importing CSV to Evolution

I’ve decided to try GNOME on a new machine that I’ve got, and as part of the move I’ve switched to Evolution (from Kontact). I had some contacts stored in a spreadsheet, which I’ve tried to import as CSV to Evolution.

Apparently, unlike Kontact, Evolution won’t ask you what every column means. It would just assume that the CSV is in some weird scheme. If you try to import the CSV, it would force the scheme on your CSV even if it looks completely different. The result: a complete mess of the fields in each contact.

I didn’t find a reference for how Evolution expects its CSVs to look, and I didn’t want to analyze that either. So finally, I’ve set up a virtual machine, loaded it with the openSUSE KDE live CD, imported the CSV into Kontact, and exported it as VCard, which I imported to Evolution.

I believe that the current CSV import in Evolution just causes user frustration, as it doesn’t act as expected.

Other weird problems I’ve encountered in Evolution, which I didn’t solve yet:

1. Evolution gives me “Could not remove address book” when I try to delete an existing address book. After restarting the program, I’ve succeeded in deleting some of them, but not all of them.
2. When I imported the VCard from Kontact, the contacts appeared in every address book (except one) and also appeared magically in new address books I’ve created. The contacts in each of the address books seem to be linked together. When I’ve tried to delete them from one address book, they’ve disappeared from the rest as well.

If you know how to solve these issues, I would really like to hear.