Working on contacts

[phatkat66]

Hi everyone, im currently debating on weather or not to erase my contacts completely and add them over by scratch to my droid or not.

I have over 500 contacts that have been accumulating over the past 10 yrs. I have 20 people with the same name and just some initial letter after but that was when I was a kid and was lazy, now i don't remember which "jennifer" this is anymore and I honestly only use maybe 10 - 20 contacts throughout the 500+.

My concern is my contacts are synced to my gmail account. Which doesnt hurt but I kinda don't want that. If somehow someone got into my gmail account they can erase my entire phone book from there. Which really sucks. I dont want to lose these numbers I simply want them off my phone.

Does anyone know of a way I can take my contacts, store them, and print them out? And when I add my contacts back in if there is a way I can just keep it directly to the phone and not have it affected by gmail or any outside source?

 

[Backnblack]

Export them out of Gmail, You can stop Gmail from syncing with your phone but that might keep email from syncing also...

 

[phatkat66]

Is there a way to print them out? When u exported them ans looked at the excel files they look out of place and not really readable so im guessing the structure is soley for importing/exporting. But id like to just print them out if possible

 

[Droids]

For backup purposes, just export them as a gmail csv file. I did so, and I opened the csv in Excel and cleaned them all up, they were a mess. Then I deleted all the contacts from gmail and imported the cleaned up contacts and everything regarding contacts has been perfect since then. I don't see much point in printing them, as you would never want to manually type them all in again, not when you have 500 of them. But you could print from Excel, it would be messy considering all the columns that are included.

 

[phatkat66]

Actually I kind of do want to manually input them again. Although I have 500, i only use 20 at most. Im just one of those people that don't like to throw anything away. I still have a phone book from elementary school lol (my first black book for the ladies numbers LOL)

But my idea is to add them one by one so I can input them the way I like. My contacts names aren't always their First name sometimes i just use their nickname, also alot of my friends dont use gmail and Id want to add their hotmail,aol,aim,yahoo email myself.

So should I just export the contacts as a gmail csv file and clean up the messy looking spreadsheet myself? (Thats kinda the long tedious task im trying to avoid)

 

[stdesign]

... I did so, and I opened the csv in Excel and cleaned them all up, they were a mess...

I was wondering... Is there an easy way to do the clean up? I exported my contacts to the Droid from my Palm 755p; I had been transferring from one Palm device to the other for years now and that worked great, but now the .csv file is a mess all of the sudden :huh: . I'm getting a lot of quotes in the file, and I'd like to know what pattern to look for (other than commas or the record's information itself). Other than that, I'm guessing I'd have to plod through the file's contents (over 600 records) until everything looked good in an Excel spreadsheet, and then overwrite the (mostly) messy records I have in Gmail and on the Droid now. Just wondering if you have any tips for making this a bit easier. TIA .

 

[iPirate]

You could group them and display only the group with the 20 you use most often in the contacts list.

 

[stdesign]

You could group them and display only the group with the 20 you use most often in the contacts list.

Just found out how to do this... It's helpful for the good contacts I've got now. Thanks.

 

[ddroid]

phone book -- showing right contact

My contacts were in Outlook. I synched them with Gmail contacts and thus to my phone. I have two problems:

Multiple people with the same phone number. For example, everyone in my family has the home phone in their contact data. I made a separate contact called Madison Street for our home number, but it shows my son instead. He is not alphabetically before Madison or Street. Do I have to remove the home number from the family members??? Can I choose a priority somehow??

I had business numbers with an extension on the end., ex: 111-222-3333x7. I cannot seem to edit my contact to use pauses or waits. Waaa! Can you help?

 

[stdesign]

My contacts were in Outlook. I synched them with Gmail contacts and thus to my phone. I have two problems:

Multiple people with the same phone number. For example, everyone in my family has the home phone in their contact data. I made a separate contact called Madison Street for our home number, but it shows my son instead. He is not alphabetically before Madison or Street. Do I have to remove the home number from the family members??? Can I choose a priority somehow??

I had business numbers with an extension on the end., ex: 111-222-3333x7. I cannot seem to edit my contact to use pauses or waits. Waaa! Can you help?

What I'm getting from this conversation is... You have to edit the .CSV file (that's: Comma Separated Value). It's a text file that Outlook should have sent over when they were converted to Gmail contacts. Each record is (or should be) separated by a comma. You'll have to have Outlook export a .csv file again so you can edit your records (deleting duplicates, and fixing broken records) with either a text editing, or spreadsheet program on your computer. My .csv file, for instance, has a lot of quote marks in it, and I need to find out what that means so I can fix it (lots of broken and inter-mixed records in there). It takes time to do this if you have a lot of records, but I think it's the only way to fix it. You can then check the repaired .csv file in a spreadsheet program like Excel (checking that the proper data is lining up with the headings), and then re-import that file into Gmail (overwriting the existing records with the fixed ones). On the Gmail/Droid side of things; your problem with multiple people under the same phone number is understandable, as the Droid contacts app doesn't seem to handle this very well; possibly making a record for each person with the same phone number will fix it? Hope that helps.

 

[ddroid]

My contacts were in Outlook. I synched them with Gmail contacts and thus to my phone. I have two problems:

Multiple people with the same phone number. For example, everyone in my family has the home phone in their contact data. I made a separate contact called Madison Street for our home number, but it shows my son instead. He is not alphabetically before Madison or Street. Do I have to remove the home number from the family members??? Can I choose a priority somehow??

I had business numbers with an extension on the end., ex: 111-222-3333x7. I cannot seem to edit my contact to use pauses or waits. Waaa! Can you help?

What I'm getting from this conversation is... You have to edit the .CSV file (that's: Comma Separated Value). It's a text file that Outlook should have sent over when they were converted to Gmail contacts. Each record is (or should be) separated by a comma. You'll have to have Outlook export a .csv file again so you can edit your records (deleting duplicates, and fixing broken records) with either a text editing, or spreadsheet program on your computer. My .csv file, for instance, has a lot of quote marks in it, and I need to find out what that means so I can fix it (lots of broken and inter-mixed records in there). It takes time to do this if you have a lot of records, but I think it's the only way to fix it. You can then check the repaired .csv file in a spreadsheet program like Excel (checking that the proper data is lining up with the headings), and then re-import that file into Gmail (overwriting the existing records with the fixed ones). On the Gmail/Droid side of things; your problem with multiple people under the same phone number is understandable, as the Droid contacts app doesn't seem to handle this very well; possibly making a record for each person with the same phone number will fix it? Hope that helps.

Sigh, yes I have exported it that way, but there were sooo many columns to check (yes, I can hide them in Excel, but do I really want to? This is my database I'm talkin 'bout).

I have 2100+ contacts. Sheesh. I used my Outlook/Palm contacts as a sort of memory lane. Now I'm drowning. Gmail contacts editing is sooo sllloooowwww. Yep, CSV is probably the answer.

I just hate to take out home numbers just because someone also has a cell. I have separate listings for husbands and wives, but would like to have the same home number listed for each of them. Shouldn't that be okay? How do you work around that?

 

[stdesign]

My contacts were in Outlook. I synched them with Gmail contacts and thus to my phone. I have two problems:

Multiple people with the same phone number. For example, everyone in my family has the home phone in their contact data. I made a separate contact called Madison Street for our home number, but it shows my son instead. He is not alphabetically before Madison or Street. Do I have to remove the home number from the family members??? Can I choose a priority somehow??

I had business numbers with an extension on the end., ex: 111-222-3333x7. I cannot seem to edit my contact to use pauses or waits. Waaa! Can you help?

What I'm getting from this conversation is... You have to edit the .CSV file (that's: Comma Separated Value). It's a text file that Outlook should have sent over when they were converted to Gmail contacts. Each record is (or should be) separated by a comma. You'll have to have Outlook export a .csv file again so you can edit your records (deleting duplicates, and fixing broken records) with either a text editing, or spreadsheet program on your computer. My .csv file, for instance, has a lot of quote marks in it, and I need to find out what that means so I can fix it (lots of broken and inter-mixed records in there). It takes time to do this if you have a lot of records, but I think it's the only way to fix it. You can then check the repaired .csv file in a spreadsheet program like Excel (checking that the proper data is lining up with the headings), and then re-import that file into Gmail (overwriting the existing records with the fixed ones). On the Gmail/Droid side of things; your problem with multiple people under the same phone number is understandable, as the Droid contacts app doesn't seem to handle this very well; possibly making a record for each person with the same phone number will fix it? Hope that helps.

Sigh, yes I have exported it that way, but there were sooo many columns to check (yes, I can hide them in Excel, but do I really want to? This is my database I'm talkin 'bout).

I have 2100+ contacts. Sheesh. I used my Outlook/Palm contacts as a sort of memory lane. Now I'm drowning. Gmail contacts editing is sooo sllloooowwww. Yep, CSV is probably the answer.

I just hate to take out home numbers just because someone also has a cell. I have separate listings for husbands and wives, but would like to have the same home number listed for each of them. Shouldn't that be okay? How do you work around that?

I'm afraid we'll have to wait for a better contacts application to come out... The current one just isn't flexible enough for what (you and I both) would like to accomplish :icon_ nono2: .

 

[ananDay]

In fact,you can save your contacts to computer,Not only can save space, and more safety,Use some tool to transfer your contacts from android phone to computer,Hope this can help you!