Google/Android Contact Management-Help Please

[Phog Allen]

Gents, not to sound too terribly dense about the situation but it seems that Google, in its never ending quest to share information, has a rather large appetite for contacts. Rather, the making of them it seems.

Now first up, let me say I am not much of an email user. Truth told I kind of dislike it. What I dislike the most is the complexity of many of the functions. At times, Gmail has decided on its own to send certain emails to certain folders or groups whether I asked it to or not. The complexity issue goes with a lot of email clients. I know, I know. It should be old hat for anyone in the computer age but I'm hanged if I can make smooth use of any email client.

One issue is extra contacts I don't want. When we made the family switch to smart phones(oxymoron I am convinced) from dumb phones, the only really practical way was to use a SIM card and insert it into each phone and copy from phone to SIM. The new phones use micro SIM and saving to each SIM would have been a pain and the clerk would have had to scan each SIM in a machine and copy it to the new micro SIMs and keep it all straight. I made the frightful decision to insert my SIM into each phone and copy the contacts. When I inserted it into my new mobile it of course synced it to Gmail straight away and now I have a load of contact I don't need.

Also, Google seemingly takes a few things upon its own 'authority' to do and has more than once changed the way my contacts appear. I was raised to give lists of proper names a certain parlance; Last name first/comma/first name/comma/middle initial. This works quite well for me since I am used to looking for last names in a list.

No matter how many times I select 'display last name first' or however it is actually labeled, Contacts seems to do as they ruddy well please. So is there decently easy way(something that won't take a full day of typing) to give them the display characteristics I mentioned? And other than simply deleting the 'foreign' contacts, is there an easy way to save them to a file or message I can send to each of the other devises we own? Some are my daughter's and some are my wife's. I also like to keep multiple numbers or emails under one contact title and editing and saving those changes seems tedious at times. Any pointers there as to how to speed it up? Thank you for any help.

 

[AvariCe]

Go to contacts -> menu -> Export to storage/SD card. If you're lucky, you'll be able to export only the contacts you want. Some devices allow manually picking the contacts while others just export everything.

As for the contact order, where your contacts something like this: Smith,John,M ? If so, try having them displayed by first name.

 

[dpm802]

I, too am a little befuddled by contact management.

My Android phone wants to list ALL of my contacts, including everyone of my Facebook friends, my Google+ buddies, my Hotmail and GMail and Yahoo mail contacts, and my phone contacts.

I've tried different filtering processes, and this works a little, but not all the time. It isn't long before the list is filled up again with junk info.

All I really want is just my Phone contacts and Hotmail contacts ... the rest is just clutter that I never, ever use and it just gets in the way.

I get a little unnerved sometimes with how much Google and Facebook and other InterWeb Biggies know about me, and assume that I'd be interested in. Facebook has scanned through my Hotmail contacts and suggested that I might like to be friends with someone I got an eMail from about 7 years ago. NO, I'm not interested in that person. And how dare they go looking through my Hotmail account? I don't remember them asking for permission to do so, and if they had, I would not have allowed it.

 

[StillShaving]

If you are still working on this problem, I will be interested in learning how you found to best manage it.

I don't have the need to sync contacts between family members, but it is an area I found lacking on Android and iOS (which I not using currently). I wanted to clean up my contacts (Address book) across devices and it better organized. When looking for a solution a few months ago, it appeared that a lot of people used gmail or some other central source to push contacts and then sync back out. I did not want to load all my contacts into gmail, so I gave up for the moment. It is a bit frustrating as my ancient Palm PDA had much better address book organization.

 

[Phog Allen]

Stillshaving, right you are. The smartphone was supposed to streamline all this but it only seems to get worse. I suspect most of it comes to n to data mining. Google just wants to ink everything about everybody. I did find that Gmail now has a feature to merge duplicate contacts and even with my very sparse ardress book it found eight duplicates. I still haven't tackled the whole issue.

 

[langod]

I've found the best way to manage android phone contacts is to use the Gmail address book. If you use your computer instead of your phone, you can use the full web-browser interface and organize your contacts much more easily. Also, set up some groups. Put the contacts you want to always see on your phone into a group or groups -- like family, friends, business, etc, and then you should be able to filter the view on your phone to show only selected groups.

Maybe I accepted a really big cup of the koolaid, but I actually find it quite convenient to have all of my contact's information easily available on all of my devices whether it's my phone, laptop, work PC, tablet, etc.

 

[StillShaving]

For the most part I want to share contacts across devices, I just want control over which cloud provider can see it and how much of it. While I trust google more than say facebook, I would prefer not to depend on gmail for my address book management or give it to access contacts that have no email address. Even though my address book is not so sensitive, ideally I would like to compartmentalize and share certain data with applications only as necessary.

Still I appreciate hearing your experience with the gmail address book. I may end up there as well, it is not like google doesn't already know. ;-)