moving contacts from windows to new Mac

Hi I am the very proud owner of a new Macbook Pro, I have seen the light and left windows and microsoft behind after 20 odd years. This is quite a change and am enjoying the challenge but somethings are puzzling. I am trying to move my contacts from my old laptop to my Mac, it seems that some of them have come over via iCloud (don't really understand all that as have never used iCloud before). I seem to have two contact lists, one for yahoo mail and one for my BTinternet. Neither seem to have all the information that they should do, many are missing the email addresses! and they seem to have the snail mail address in twice. I have tried altering this and get nowhere, the double addresses come back and when I try to correct a mistake it won't let me, it reverts to as it was before. Is this something to do with iCloud? how do I stop it happening and how do I get my contacts physically onto my Mac? Sorry if this seems a daft question but I have been trying for a couple of days to sort this problem and I have got nowhere!!!

Thank you in anticipation of any help you can give me. Bye the way, how come they don't supply an instruction manual with the Macs? Think I shall invest in a mac book for dummies.

Oh, bye the way the operating system is mavericks.

Just had another try at my contacts, I am getting a warning triangle that says CoreDAVErrorDomainerror3 this appears by one or both account after a little rotating wheel stops running. I took out some contacts then added them from scratch, I now have 5 entries for one of the entries. Please help.

The easiest way to transfer your contact information from Windows to your new MacBook Pro is to first save your contacts in Windows to a "Vcard.vcf" file. Windows supports that format and so does your new Mac. Once the file is saved, move it to your Mac and then select import from your "contacts.app". It will import the vcf file and the contacts app will place the information in the proper place and in the correct format.

Once your contacts application has all your contacts, addresses, phone numbers, and so on, you can sync that information to your iPhone, iPad, or another Mac over WiFi or iCloud.

Thanks for that, will try that tomorrow, I have been working on the problem for hours now trying to sort the contacts to in yahoo, have only managed to lose all contacts on the Mac now!

Any ideas on the error message I am getting?