New to Droid, former PPC user

[club708]

I got the Droid yesterday to replace my HTC Touch Pro. I have used PPC for about 12 years now. Decided to move to Droid for the speed and apps factor after talking to a rep about the contacts. I use my contacts every day for work. The only problem I have now is I can't seem to find a way to veiw contacts by company. Is there a way to do this or an app someone knows of that will. I am use to sync'n with outlook and searching by company is extremely important because I deal with companies whos managers change from year to year sometimes so looking them up by name won[t do me any good.

 

[christim]

I got the Droid yesterday to replace my HTC Touch Pro. I have used PPC for about 12 years now. Decided to move to Droid for the speed and apps factor after talking to a rep about the contacts. I use my contacts every day for work. The only problem I have now is I can't seem to find a way to veiw contacts by company. Is there a way to do this or an app someone knows of that will. I am use to sync'n with outlook and searching by company is extremely important because I deal with companies whos managers change from year to year sometimes so looking them up by name won[t do me any good.

Don't know if this will help or not but visiting gmail you can export your entire contact list to a spreadsheet. You can then rearrange the columns. Some people would rather have contacts sort by last name. Others have the first/last name in the given name field and nothing in the family name field. If it works for you you could put the company name in the first-name field and the entire real person's name into the family (last) name field. As soon as you replace the contacts in gmail they will be replaced in your phone. No idea if you still are syncing with outlook or not.

Welcome to the world of Droid!

 

[adroitnaut]

Organization of contacts does not have many options. The only advise I have is to organize the different Companies into "Groups" in your G-mail account. You can also do a "search" of your contacts using the company names.

It is also possible to sync. your G-mail with other email accounts.

 

[rushmr2]

Organization of contacts does not have many options. The only advise I have is to organize the different Companies into "Groups" in your G-mail account. You can also do a "search" of your contacts using the company names.

It is also possible to sync. your G-mail with other email accounts.

This is basically the same thing, but you can edit the organization info in the contact, then do a search for that, but I don't know of a way to organize the contacts by anything other than first name.

 

[adroitnaut]

"I don't know of a way to organize the contacts by anything other than first name."

I don't know a way to do that either and there is no end to the irritation that it causes me! I prefer last names first in the lists.

The suggestion that "christim" made in a previous post about exporting the contact list to a spread sheet and swapping the first and last names, then re-import the spread sheet data back into your G-mail account after deleting all your contacts would work if you have the skills to pull it off. I have successfully done this when I exported all my "windows Mail" contacts into my G-mail account. It is a bit tedious but doable. I did not want to sync my other Email accounts with G-mail.

 

[nateccnn]

Search the market for Power Search. It searchs everything but you can uncheck everything except contacts if that is all you want
I can't beleive the native contacts does not have a search feature...who is Google anyhow? But if it did everything out of the box then what would developers do?

Nate

 

[club708]

Ok, so I have tried the whole search feature and do a search for the company name, which seems to be working for the way I would check my contacts. There are two more problems I have encountered.
1. Search sometimes does not pull up every contact in that company even though they are all spelled the same it will miss a few. Anyone else had a problem with search?
2. Is there any way to expand the notes section in the contact withough going to the edit function. I store a lot of info in the notes tab for my customers which is why I use the contacts in the first place? I have tried to press the little note thing off to the side with no success.

 

[jsh1120]

Ok, so I have tried the whole search feature and do a search for the company name, which seems to be working for the way I would check my contacts. There are two more problems I have encountered.
1. Search sometimes does not pull up every contact in that company even though they are all spelled the same it will miss a few. Anyone else had a problem with search?
2. Is there any way to expand the notes section in the contact withough going to the edit function. I store a lot of info in the notes tab for my customers which is why I use the contacts in the first place? I have tried to press the little note thing off to the side with no success.

Not sure if this is your problem, but just in case...

1. Make sure that all contacts in a particular group/company/etc. have phone numbers associated with their names. There are options in various search functions to limit the result set to those with phone numbers so you may be experiencing this problem.

2. If it's possible/convenient, do your editing of contacts on your laptop/desktop system by going to contacts from your gmail account rather than trying to do all the work on your phone. The "contacts" app on your phone is really designed to display and use contacts and occasionally to enter new information. Extensive manipulation and editing of contacts is a job for the full application on your google account.

P.S. You might also want to download "Gesture Search" from the Market. It allows you to enter letters on the screen with your finger to search contacts (as well as app names and music if you choose.) A number of people find it very useful and quicker than using the keyboard and at least as accurate as voice search.

 

[warrior21]

"I don't know of a way to organize the contacts by anything other than first name."

I don't know a way to do that either and there is no end to the irritation that it causes me! I prefer last names first in the lists.

The suggestion that "christim" made in a previous post about exporting the contact list to a spread sheet and swapping the first and last names, then re-import the spread sheet data back into your G-mail account after deleting all your contacts would work if you have the skills to pull it off. I have successfully done this when I exported all my "windows Mail" contacts into my G-mail account. It is a bit tedious but doable. I did not want to sync my other Email accounts with G-mail.

If you use "dialer one" it allows you to list your contacts with the last name first

 

[adroitnaut]

Thanks for all the helpful tips! Those search features worked out great for me. I liked "Power Search" and "Gesture Search". I am going try "Dialer One" today.


By the way, you can do a search in "Contacts" by name only using the hard search key on the bottom right of the Moto Droid when contacts is open.

 

[christim]

Exporting Gmail contacts - Gmail Help

1. Sign in to Gmail.
2. Click Contacts along the side of any Gmail page.
3. Click Export at the top of your Contacts list.
4. Choose whether to export all contacts or only one group.
5. Select the format in which you'd like to export your contacts' information.
6. Click Export.
7. Choose Save to Disk then click OK.
8. Select a location to save your file, and click 'OK.'

edit the CVS file to suite using OpenOffice's Calc or Excel

Then import into gmail
Importing contacts by CSV - Gmail Help

1. Sign in to Gmail.
2. Click Contacts (located below your list of views) on any Gmail page.
3. Click Import in the top portion of the Contact Manager.
4. Click the Browse... or Choose File button and locate the CSV file you'd like to upload.
5. Select the file and click the Import button.

Pretty much you just switch the first/last name columns and you are good to go. You may get by with changing the column name so first name contains last names.

Likewise, as mentioned above, anything you put in that firstname field is what the Android Contacts will search on.