exporting csv contacts from gmail account to openoffice spreadsheet

[Tapas Mishra]

Here is a tutorial
http://www.labnol.org/software/mail-merge-with-gmail/13289/
which I am trying to work on my machine.
That links talks about creating a mail merge in gmail.
The reason I am trying above is I sit usually in environments where
proxy exist/do not exist and this is a frequent situation for me.
I do not have a network admin configuring any sort of port mapping for
me to be able have a mail merge sort of thing.
What I want to know is,is there a way I can copy paste all the
contacts which I download from my gmail account.
What I see my contact list when I download from my gmail account is
624 rows and each row has a single column and delimiter being comma
,,, which is not once but many times.
I have tried exporting my contacts as csv files when it asks for type
:google csv or to use in outlook.

The situation which is troubling is uneven formatting of csv file that
I download.
In some places the number of comma ,,, appearance of star * ,presence
of phone number * are  not certain.
So I can not go and copy paste manually 624 contacts to one excel
sheet as given on the above tutorial.
Is there an easy way to work in this situation.