How to put words in contacts phone number listing

[ntoto2]

I want to insert letters, a name or initials after a phone number in my contacts to distinguish which mobile or home number goes to which person within a contact.

[TwerpPoet]

I'm really curious about your reasoning on this one, if you don't mind.

Wouldn't it be easier to just have a separate contact entry for each person?

[ntoto2]

My 700 contacts list came over from a previous phone intact and I would need to manually separate each person from those 700 contacts. I could just add an initial or two to each and be done with it.

[TwerpPoet]

Ouch!

Wish I could help, but as far as I can tell the stock contact app won't do it. Maybe one of the alternate ones on the Market can create custom field labels, but 700 would also be hard to handle.

The other option is to export the contact database as a csv file, edit it into separate contacts in a spread sheet, and re-import it. I looked into it, and while it seems possible I don't have the experience to tell you how or if this would work exactly.

Also, if you still have the original phone someone might have a way of pulling the contacts off it again, but in the correct format.

Hope someone else comes along who can give you better advice.

Ya, no help at all. Sorry.

[christim]

If you go to gmail.com and edit the contacts from there you can add a non-numeric character to the end of the phone number. No idea what happens when you dial it though.

Your best bet, if the above doesn't work, is to do as the above poster suggested. You can go to gmail.com and export your entire list to a spreadsheet, make your adjustments, then import them back in.

[madonnell]

I'm in a similar boat - I just made the palmOS -> droid jump. Have about 1000 contacts, many with 2-4 #s. I've used a comment at the end of the phone#s for ages to distinguish them (I don't want 3-4 contact entries per family, with 90% common). I converted then thru palm export -> excel -> cleanup/reformat -> csv -> gmail -> droid, and believe it or not, it pretty well worked. Except for this same issue. the droid convert the word at the end to numbers and appends it to the phone#, then says 'oh, that must be international' - it dials peru when I dial my wife.

Any progress on this?

All I've found - the droid pro recognizes the ';' as a pause with a prompt (and ',' as a 1-2 sec pause). If I prefix the comment with a ';', so it looks like "555-555-5555 ; joe", it dials correctly then prompts 'do you want to dial 563', at which time I can tap 'no'. Real kludge. And it won't send a text to that number because it is malformed. Argh.

Love to hear someone found a solution.

[furbearingmammal]

No solution; it's how the OS is set up. Every person needs a different contact, but every contact can have multiple numbers assigned. "dial Joe Schmoe at Mobile" works fine for a voice command over my Bluetooth headset. "Call Mary Reynolds at Home" etc.

[TwerpPoet]

This is about half speculation, but I'll add it anyway.

I sync my MobileMe address book , and I noticed that my custom labels show up on the phone. That means that instead of a phone being labeled as work, home, or mobile I can add my own labels like; billing, support, or Jimmy Dean.

Of course I can't edit these on the phone {correction, you can create custom labels on the phone. Must have been added recently, because I tried this before. }, but I wondered. If they get synced then Google Contacts must have this ability.

Sure enough, you can create custom labels in Contacts on Google. I suspect, but would not bet my life, that they will show up on the phone when synced.

So, if you are syncing with Google, go into your contacts and create custom labels for each phone number. At first I was afraid this would create a long list of custom labels, but apparently not. None of the custom labels I created showed up on the pull down menu.

A lot of work for 1000 contacts, I know. But at least it is something you can do. If the letters are still at the end of the numbers you could save a bit of time with cut and paste.

Come to think of it, you might be able to change these in the spreadsheet too. Make a couple custom labels, export the address book, and see what they look like.

Good luck.