Ashmerge

Hi all!
I believe I'm not the only one who wants to have his contacts nice and tidy all inclusive. After going through all the imaginable threads about this, I'm thinking this:

IS THERE ANY WAY WHATSOEVER TO GET ALL OF THEM TIDIED UP INTO ONE SINGLE LIST, FOR GOOD?

I mean, the HTC app does a pretty good job of merging them, but how about a place where all my MERGED contacts can be saved and restored, should my phone meet a nasty end?

There is that screen, if you go to "people" where you have everything merged and cleaned, but what i'm talking about is a way to get a table with all that merged data exported to one file. In that thing, you'd have one main name per contact, and a whole tree of accounts associated to that contact (fb, yahoo, google, phone, flickr, everything). Then you'd save that on your desktop/SD/whatever and keep it safe. Then, you clear out every one of those stumps (delete all contacts on all services) and upload that tidy tree of deliciously merged contacts.

All could work fine if there were a way to get the merged data from the HTC contacts app. Or does it work some other way? Would there be an app that does that?
Anyone know anything?
Help?

El Presidente

You can export your contacts as a .csv file and save to your SD Card and put the file on your PC.

Your contacts should also be backed up to the google account associated with your phone. Open Gmail via a normal web browser, hit Contacts and you should see all your numbers.

As for FB, flickr etc, they're not really on the device per sé, they're held on the FB/Flickr/twitter servers. When your phone syncs, it pulls them down/deletes them as appropriate.

Xyro

I know that if you use google contacts, the stock firmware adds notes to them when you link them to facebook/twitter accounts:

<HTCData><Facebook>id:********/friendof:*******</Facebook></HTCData>

I don't really know how it works, but presumably that means that if you ever have to start afresh, your google contacts will automatically be linked to facebook and twitter contacts.

__________________

dvhttn

I use Outlook as my master contacts database, have done for several years. I first started it when a friend, who was effectively my boss at the time, gave me his business contacts database. When I went through it most of the contacts had things missing, phone numbers were in the wrong place, etc etc. I went through tidying things up. Mainly to get them onto the Nokia phone I had at the time. At some stage I also transferred my personal address book to Outlook (from a physical notebook) and was fairly consistent with the way I entered phone numbers, (all were entered with the international code first - even if they were local numbers - no need to change when I went abroad then), postal addresses, email addresses etc. Now I have a "clean" contacts database which I can sync with my DHD or with the wife's Nokia.

So, what I'm basically saying is, even if you don't go down the Outlook route, there's some 'donkey work' involved in sorting out your contacts initially. You'll thank yourself for it in the future .... honest ...

Dave