Guide to transferring contacts to Hero?

[NiceCupOfTea]

Hi all,

I want to bring all my contacts accross from my old HTC TyTN II and keep them as they are (including groupings if possible).

I understand I can either do this by putting them into GMail online and letting the phone get them from there, or by using ActiveSync/Outlook and letting the Hero pick them up when plugged in.

My problem is this - my Hero has associated with my GMail account and downloaded all my "contacts" from there - I don't have any saved on my GMail accounts and it seems to be a list of everybody who I have emailed (sometimes only once!!). I don't want these as contacts in my phone (although I would like to keep some of the email addresses and put them into my contacts).

How can I stop them getting mixed up? Can I get the phone/GMail to ask before it adds a newly emailed/received from person as a contact?

Many thanks!

 

[colsnr]

On my TyTn II i saved my contacts to SIM.
Took the SIM out and put it in my Hero.
On Hero I went into All Programs > People.....select Menu > Import.
It put all the contacts on my new phone.
Then put my new Sim back.

Not sure if this is what your after.

 

[NiceCupOfTea]

On my TyTn II i saved my contacts to SIM.
Took the SIM out and put it in my Hero.
On Hero I went into All Programs > People.....select Menu > Import.
It put all the contacts on my new phone.
Then put my new Sim back.

Not sure if this is what your after.

Thanks chap - not really, my contacts are all in Outlook format (ie, several numbers, address, emails, photo, all under one name, as opposed to SIM card format (one number per 10 character name).

3 main questions I guess:

- what's the best way of transferring them: outlook, GMail, or a 3rd way?
- does the Hero keep contacts from google separate from normal contacts?
- can I stop the Hero/GMail adding every email address I have ever sent to/received from to my contacts?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Andronix]

Thanks chap - not really, my contacts are all in Outlook format (ie, several numbers, address, emails, photo, all under one name, as opposed to SIM card format (one number per 10 character name).

3 main questions I guess:

- what's the best way of transferring them: outlook, GMail, or a 3rd way?
- does the Hero keep contacts from google separate from normal contacts?
- can I stop the Hero/GMail adding every email address I have ever sent to/received from to my contacts?

Thanks in advance!

export contacts from outlook into .vcf file and use "vCard IO" util to import them into android.

 

[trick202]

Yeah, I was going to suggest something similar.

If the contacts in your gmail are largely useless, and the ones you want to keep from there are on your tytn anyway, then I would do this:

Sync tytn with outlook.
Export all contacts from outlook to csv file.
Go into gmail
delete ALL contacts and allow the hero to sync. (now you have no contacts on phone or on gmail.)
Now turn hero off to stop it syncing while you do the next bits
Import all contacts from csv file into gmail.
*: I think it actually asks you if you want to create a subfolder for the imported contacts when you import.

I did it this way with other half's blackberry pearl. The contacts are nice and easy to work with while in gmail too.

After you have them how you like, turn on hero again, sync hero with gmail.

Voila!

 

[chris4chelsea]

i tried.. and it doesnt seem to work for ... - can I stop the Hero/GMail adding every email address I have ever sent to/received from to my contacts?


besides, it wont ask if i want to create under a subfolder...

 

[Neon]

I actually registered specifically to find out more about this issue. So the main thing is to get them into a third part app to organise them?

I had the same problem that my GMail contacts are super messy, so when I imported my SIM contacts from my old phone I ended up with an eternal mess of all sorts of things. Hell, I was in my own phone 5 times!

I've been prodding and poking my gmail contacts to clean them up, but it's a little tedious and I really would rather take my phonebook from my old phone and add in all the additional information to that, rather than take GMail as the bible.

So is Outlook the way forward then? Having transferred my phonebook from place to place, I know that every phone uses a different database, so if anyone knows of the best way to format my contacts database in an Android friendly way, I'd greatly appreciate the input

Ta,
Dave

 

[JoeC]

I noticed that Google synchronizes with My Contacts in GMail, not All Contacts. So, if you clean or complete clear out My Contacts, the phone contacts should clear.

When I first did this exercise to get all of my telephone contacts into Google, I ended doing a comma-delimited text file. It wasn't that clean of an import, but at least it created the entries. From there, I just cleaned them up.

You should know that Google's contacts import can use CSV or vCard format, so that should help you out.

 

[Neon]

Yes, that's the route that I went down in the end, exporting my Gmail contacts to a CSV and manually copying the data in using Excel.

Still, I can't seem to find a way to clear the phone of contacts, or force a sync?

 

[MartinS]

I find that Sync to Outlook works well.

Sometimes the phone needs to be switched off and back on again to get the sync option to come up on the pull down menu though...

 

[Neon]

I must be being slow, but I can't seem to clear the phone of contacts. I've cleared out my GMail contact list and am in the sync menu watching the contacts sync icons spinning around, but no matter how many times I force a sync by switching the sync on and off, the contacts remain.

Is there a way to force a clear of the contacts without resetting the phone, which frankly I'm getting pretty close to at this stage, as I'm finding sorting out my contact list incredibly frustrating

 

[JoeC]

Yes, that's the route that I went down in the end, exporting my Gmail contacts to a CSV and manually copying the data in using Excel.

Still, I can't seem to find a way to clear the phone of contacts, or force a sync?

Hmm, it should be synchronizing them right away. You may have to clear the cache in the GMail and GMail Storage Application settings and then check and recheck data synchronization. Remember that Google uses "My Contacts" and not "All Contacts" for sync.

 

[MartinS]

I must be being slow, but I can't seem to clear the phone of contacts. I've cleared out my GMail contact list and am in the sync menu watching the contacts sync icons spinning around, but no matter how many times I force a sync by switching the sync on and off, the contacts remain.

Is there a way to force a clear of the contacts without resetting the phone, which frankly I'm getting pretty close to at this stage, as I'm finding sorting out my contact list incredibly frustrating

You can go into contacts and press menu then delete and it allows you to check them all. Obviously depends how many you have...

Alternatively you could sync it with a blank Outlook contact list and select to keep Outlook contacts.

There must be an easier way.

 

[Neon]

Okay, so I've managed to get it to work finally. I'll outline the steps I took in case they are of help to anyone else struggling with this fiendish issue.

1. Export your contact list from Gmail to a CSV, save it somewhere safe
2. Delete all your GMail contacts
3. Sync your phone with Outlook
4. Once complete, delete all the contacts and sync again
5. This will have cleared your phone of phone contacts
6. Then I synced the phone with goolge again
7. After that, I edited the csv in Excel to add all the information I wanted
8. Yeah, manually a row at a time
9. Then I reimported the csv into GMail
10. Tweaked various errors and bad data
11. Then I synced my phone again
12. And again, sat and tweaked the data on the phone to get it just right

I certainly hope this helps anyone else! I had work to do tonight too

 

[NiceCupOfTea]

What a nightmare...

I am dreading this. Mine is a complete mess at the moment, but I'm holding off until I have time to do the ROM update and I will start again.

It's obvious that most people coming to a smartphone will have a long list of contacts that will be specially formatted, especially if coming from another smartphone. So why can't they do some kind of seamless import or a conversion program?

As Outlook is the industry standard it seems a bit of a nobrainer really.

One thing that left me stranded this week was realising that on the "phone" screen, typing in the name of a company won't search this field in the phone which actually was a real problem when I was out and about and couldn't contact the place I was on my way to!

I have discoverd that if you open the "people" app you CAN search on company names though, so there is a workaround...

 

[mohulis]

Is there a fairly easy way to do this from a mac? I'll be getting the Sprint Hero when it's released, coming from an iPhone and I use a mac. All my contact info is in the Address Book app in Leopard, and I can extract to vCard format.... but only one contact at a time, which would be extremely tedious and time consuming if I have to do it that way. The only way I've found to export my whole Address Book creates a file with an .abbu extension.

I'm sure it won't be as easy as a click or two, but I also don't want it to be a complete nightmare either, there has to be some way to make it less painful eh?

 

[jaybea830802]

You can go into contacts and press menu then delete and it allows you to check them all. Obviously depends how many you have...

Alternatively you could sync it with a blank Outlook contact list and select to keep Outlook contacts.

There must be an easier way.

There is. Go to Settings, Applications, Manage Applications (wait a while) then find Contacts Storage and click Clear Data. All gone.

There are also some data under the People application, but I think this might be your personal info rather than general contact information.

 

[NiceCupOfTea]

Chaps,

Still not quite got this sorted yet.

All my contacts are in the phone as "phone" contacts via HTCSync. How can I make these Google contacts so that I can organise everything from Google on my PC?

 

[Slug]

All my contacts are in the phone as "phone" contacts via HTCSync. How can I make these Google contacts so that I can organise everything from Google on my PC?

Export the contacts as a .csv file from whatever PC app you sync'd with, and import that into Google Mail's contacts. When you next sync with Google your contacts will appear on the handset as "Google".

There's no way to convert between types on the handset afaik.

 

[NiceCupOfTea]

Export the contacts as a .csv file from whatever PC app you sync'd with, and import that into Google Mail's contacts. When you next sync with Google your contacts will appear on the handset as "Google".

There's no way to convert between types on the handset afaik.

Really? I'm sure I imported the SIM contacts on my wife's Hero the same way...

 

[mikebellamy2k]

what a joke....sort it out HTC...starting to totally regret buying this phone

 

[NiceCupOfTea]

For anybody trying to do this I've found yet another problem with this.

If any of your address book entries have carriage returns in the address (as most seem to if created on a Windows phone), they will not be synced! (At least, not if you use windows address book).

I noticed this by accident, and have found 6 or 7 contacts that are on the phone, but not in Windows Address Book, and so haven't been exported in my CSV file or imported into GMail. Unbelievable!

Carriage returns in the "notes" field also gets it upset, although at least the contacts appear to sync.

For a so-called smart phone, where many people are going to be migrating from Windows phone, the address book conversion is WOEFUL.

IMHO they should have had a utility to process and convert address books from any other likely phone.

I spent hours sorting out my windows phone address book and now it's a complete mess.

Not helped by GMail adding every email address I receive a random mail from to my address book...