Looking for Guidance

[doyling]

Hello, I am switching to the HTC Incredible from Pocket PC. As old school Windows Mobile 6.1 on a Dell Axim may seem, it did some things very well. I am a very heavy Outlook user. I have several hundred contacts that I have sorted by Company Name, then contact name. This worked without flaw between Outlook 2010 and Pocket Informant.
Now, while using this Incredible, I have never ever been so frustrated. First I tried to sync using gSynct to Gmail, Gmail down to the phone. Wow, what a mess, contacts renamed and moved around. Of course, it then rearranged my contacts in Outlook. I spent hours trying to comb my contact list. After trying several times, I gave up. A contact such as John Doe at Bank of America Network Infrastructure Division would get named:
First Name: America
Last Name: Bank
Surname: John Doe
Company: Division Infrastructure
So, I tried using HTC sync, but more of the same. So, along come Companion Link, wow, big difference. Everything synced properly until Google got into the loop. If I don’t sync CL to Android, my contacts more or less are stable and proper. At the same time, I seem to lose my ring tones, and my dialing does not seem right. If I have CL for two way syc of contacts, then Android messes up Outlook.
Next fun was to add the Calendar. Wow, I never imagined calendar syc would go so wrong. I am not sure if it was a problem with CL, Outlook, or the Froyo 2.2 update, but my calendar events are a mess now, looks like recurring events. Many of my events doubled, even worse, many things moved a few days such as my anniversary, my wife’s birthday, payday reminders and so forth. I am not a big fan of the Deja calendar because it does not show a description of the event, just a filled in box on a calendar.
So I am asking, what are the preferred recommendations on sync.
It would be nice if Phone address book, Outlook, Gmail all have the same data, coded properly and so forth. Calendar from Outlook to show properly on phone, and again Gmail.

I understand I might be asking for too much, it seems like Android was not ready for business use. Any rule of thumb you can suggest?

[doyling]

This Android stuff and CL is really getting on my nerves. I find the Android contacts much easier to work with for making phone calls and such. But syncing Outlook to Android makes a mess of my contacts, so I use CL. I see there is an option to sync DJ contacts with Android, but I am looking for a way to do a one way sync. If I do sync between DJ and Android, CL then passes on wrong formatting of the contacts to Outlook, and I spend too much time trying to clean things up. I can't believe how much time, money and energy I have spent trying to get my contacts and calendar events to sync.

I have given up on calendar in general, nearly every repeating event has duplicated multiple times. I am at the point I am not even sure which is the right day for some things, and end up deleting them.

[doug piston]

I am not all that familiar with outlook but have you tried making a .csv from outlook and importing it into Gmail? I will keep looking for another answer though. So your not alone in this.

[jkhonea]

Export the Outlook files to a .csv format like Doug said and it should come straight into Google. I did that at the very beginning and it worked great.

[doyling]

Does anyone else think it's silly to have to export CSV files like we did 10 years ago on a Palm 3? Right now I have sync with with Android Calendar App unchecked in DJ. With this button checked, my calendar events keep moving around. Columbus day was listed as Oct 7 instead of the 11th. If I changed it in Outlook, then did a CL sync, it would jump back to the 7th. Same for my son's and sister's birthdays. I can't believe how buggy this stuff is. I don't even know if it's a CL, DJ, Outlook or Android problem.

Outlook has been a business staple for 15 years or so, every platform strove to sync properly with it, what is Android's problem? It is too late to send this unit back to Verizon, but I will not ever buy another Android device.

[doug piston]

This is sad to hear you say that. But yes outlook and android have been an issue. It has gotten better and will continue to do so. But I understand your point.