Help contact synch with Outlook stripping names

[WordyGirl]

Hello all! I'm a brand-new Thunderbolt owner (picked it up on Saturday) and new to Android, coming over from an ancient Samsung SCH-i760. Went looking at the iPhone and the Thunderbolt and thought for sure I would get the iPhone ('cause that's what all my friends had) but fell hard for the big screen on Thunderbolt and 4G speed. Sure, it has issues, but I'm old enough to know that everything has issues and I'm okay with dealing with it.

I want to say thanks to everyone who has taken the time to answer questions posted on this forum. I spent a lot of time reading it yesterday just to get better acquainted and I learned a lot. I'll try not to hit you with too many questions right off the bat. But I have a couple things I'd like to get working correctly as soon as I can - namely my contacts and my mail.

FYI - I haven't added any programs to the phone or tried to uninstall or anything like that.

Let me start by telling you what I want to be able to do. Then what I did and how it didn't quite work. Then hopefully there will be some way to make me happy.

PC is running XP and Outlook 2007. I have about 300 contacts in Outlook right now. I would like to have contacts and calendar synch with the phone and vice versa.

I downloaded HTC synch and everything went pretty much as I expected. No big surprises. Calendar was great. I made changes in both places, ran synch again, changes showed up. Happy girl.

Contacts however, not so much. I'm guessing it's a format thing with Outlook but I'm not sure how to fix it. Example - I have all the doctors listed as Dr. John Doe or Dr. Jane Smith. After synch they were listed as John Doe or Jane Smith or sometimes, just Smith. Some people I had listed as John & Jane Smith and that transferred fine. Other times it picked just one name. Some people have three names John Van Smith. In one person it took all three names. In another person it took just the last two.

So like I said, I expect it is a format issue and I'm fine if I have to go through and do a cleanup to make it consistent but the trouble is, on the surface in Outlook, it already looked consistent. The only thought I had this morning was to export the contacts and look at them outside of Outlook to see what I could do for cleanup but without knowing how the Thunderbolt will react when I run synch again, I don't want to do that yet.

Thanks for any ideas you might have on how to fix this issue.

 

[WordyGirl]

Well I just did some low-tech testing and I'm thinking that whoever wrote the code for this HTC program had it in for doctors.....here's what I did:

First went to Outlook and fixed a couple of my doctors by spelling out Doctor instead of Dr. then I ran sync and in Outlook they stayed right and on the phone, no Doctor anywhere.

Then I made a new contact called Doctor Doctor...ran sync again. Doctor Doctor is in Outlook but on my phone, an UNNAMED new contact appeared.



Then for the heck of it I made a new contact in Outlook called Zebra Donkey, ran sync, and Zebra Donkey shows up just fine.

So for some reason sync strips out out Doctor and its abbreviations.

Bizarro.

 

[TooMuch2Do914]

I am having similar problems with synching contacts. I ran into the Doctor problem, too. Searching on "derm," it came up with "Kim Dermatologist." Weirdly, Kim is the first name. I also found that it wasn't synchronizing any Contacts that didn't have an entry in Category. There are many other annoyances, but the one at the top of my list is that it synchronizes my active contacts along with my Archived Contacts. I haven't been able to find anything in HTC Synch or Outlook to get it to stop. Any ideas on this or other solutions you've found to the anomalies? Thanks!

 

[grossie]

I'm not sure if this will help or not, but you can try to synch with a gmail account and see what happens. Your contacts will appear in your new gmail account and perhaps the formatting will be better. Your phone will then synch with your gmail contacts as soon as you sign in. I don't remember the exact details but it was pretty easy to do when I switched to Android (maybe a year ago).

 

[McLabia]

I'm not sure if this will help or not, but you can try to synch with a gmail account and see what happens. Your contacts will appear in your new gmail account and perhaps the formatting will be better. Your phone will then synch with your gmail contacts as soon as you sign in. I don't remember the exact details but it was pretty easy to do when I switched to Android (maybe a year ago).

I second importing them into your Gmail contacts. Its just so much better than outlook. I was having all sorts of contacts issues when I first came to android. Once I found out that I could clean everything up in google, I was a happy camper.

 

[TooMuch2Do914]

Does synching with a Gmail fix the problem of weird lookups? I search on Debbie Fox and it displays on the screen with the correct phone number, but when I select it the Contact that displays is for Photo Costco. Anyone else having these weird lookup issues?