first name, last name issues?

I feel your pain. Something how the stock system syncs with facebook. Either way, if I can't rearrange them or they just won't appear the way I want, I delete the initial attempt and add a new contact that doesn't sync up. I then have an app, Facebook sync. I then associate the new name, with last name first, with their facebook name.

Seems strange, but it's at least a workaround. It even works with situations like my brother's g/f.... I have listed under my family's last name (for convenience) even though her facebook has her correct last name. I simply associate the wrong name with her fb and viola

 

i had the same problem, my only fix was to go to the contact in outlook and set the "file as" property on each contact the way i wanted, then export to gmail and find the duplicates, bit of messing about but it annoyed me for long enough!!
i think if you export the contacts to a .csv file you could alter the file as column in excel - which allows you to copy and paste the preference to all the contacts rather than changing them through outlook one at a time... i only noticed this after doing mine manually!

 

I find it odd that on android there is first and last name field for contacts, yet on gmail (and your google contacts in general on the web) they haven't updated it to two name fields, there is only one.

If they did that, might solve some of these issues.

 

that would be the best thing, but i've not managed to find anything that makes it that easy!
i have been trying to keep the google contacts up to date and then importing them back into outlook with the export feature in google, it's a bit of a faff around really!
i tried to use the htc sync with outlook, but it just created duplicate contacts all over the place, took longer to tidy up than to manually import/export to gmail...
it's difficult to keep on top of, i add information to contacts at different ends so an automatic sync (that works) would be great - i think google are trying to get everyone to use their system as a default rather than the evil microsoft products!