One of the downsides of my awesome new XV6700 Windows Mobile Smartphone was that somewhere along the way, I ended up with duplicate Outlook contacts. Yeah, I know there are ways to avoid this. Believe me, I didn’t intend for it to happen. But these things are part of living the Microsoft life. Let’s skip the blame game (not my fault) and move to the solution.
I’ve been through this before, last October. For whatever reason, my old Samsung SCH-i600 Smartphone that merrily had synced with Outlook just fine did the dupe business as well. I dug up a free tool I downloaded ages ago to remove the dupes, but it involved me hitting OK a lot. Like 500 to 750 times. I have a lot of contacts.
I thought I’d be smart this time. I have an old copy of Outlook that was backed up literally only a few hours before the dupe accident. I’m religious about Outlook backups. I make a copy (and on a separate drive) every day or sometimes after every working session, if I’ve done a lot of email. Pity that requires copying a 200MB file each time, rather than just the small portion that actually changes. But when you live the Microsoft life…
(Shut up, Barry Schwartz. I feel you reading and know that IM is coming — “Get a Mac, Get a Mac.” For what? So when the Mac screws up, it shows me an unhappy Mac face!).
So I copy the Contact folder from my old Outlook file to the current one. Now I have two: Contacts and Contacts1, as Outlook has called the file I brought in. All I need to do now is delete Contacts, rename Contacts1, maybe do a few other changes, and I’m set.
No, I’m not. See, you apparently can’t delete your default Contacts file. Seriously, right click on your default, and you won’t see a remove option for it. Add another Contact folder, and no problem if you want to remove that new one. But not your default.
I tried some quick searches. There’s plenty of advice on how to remove additional contact folders you may have added but not your default one. Microsoft also offers up Remove a Contacts folder from its help area, which is about making it not visible in your Address Book, rather than having it deleted altogether (and why on earth do I have to have an Address Book separate from my Contacts folder anyway? Geez. Yeah, yeah, I’ve told Outlook to use my Contacts as my Address Book, but it’s confusing to have these two things).
I was also bemused that my search brought up the hopeful sounding Delete duplicate contacts advice page from Microsoft. Wow? You mean dupe removal is built in? Sure. There’s an eight step procedure that guides you through the process of deleting each of your duplicate contacts manually. I kid you not! I wish it were a joke. Here are the last two steps:
7) In the list of contacts, press CTRL while you click each duplicate contact.
When you have selected all the duplicate contacts, press DELETE.
Yeah, that’s what I want to do, hold the CTRL button down while I select 500 to 750 duplicate contacts to delete. Can you imagine the Microsoft “How To Start Your Car” advice:
- Locate your key
- Insert your key into your car door
- Sit in your car seat
- Make sure your seat belt is buckled
- Put your foot on the brake pedal
- Locate the ignition switch, usually on the steering column
- Insert the key into the ignition switch. You insert it using the narrow end, not the end on the key ring
- Turn the key in the switch
OK, my solution was ultimately easy. I selected all my contacts in the original bad Contacts folder. I deleted all of those. Then I selected all the contacts in my good Contact1 folder and dragged-and-dropped them into the original Contacts folder. Then I deleted Contacts1. Problem solved.
Didn’t back up? OK, if your mobile device isn’t screwed up with dupes as well (mine was), you could set ActiveSync (Go Tools, Options, Rules, Conflict Resolution) to replace items on your computer with the clean version on your mobile device.
Aside from that? Slipstick is always a great site for Outlook stuff, and they’ve got an Outlook Contacts Tools page here. Lots of options to use. That software solution I used last time was Outlook Contacts Scrubber. The free version is great for those with less than 1000 items, and there’s a paid version that saves you from clicking OK all the time. I didn’t know that, or I would have just bought the tool last time. I had a version I downloaded from way back in 2003 (I’m a packrat and carry around my software downloads from years ago with me). Since I was on dial-up when my last accident happened, I went with what I had rather than seeking out a new option.
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I like your cynical M$ content. What confuses me is why you think your phone is “awesome” when it’s full of M$ crapware? A smartphone that can’t be backed up to the computer without hosing your data is worse than useless. I have a smarthphone running that crap M$ garbage excuse for an OS and I think it’s far from “awesome.” I start with Activesync on XP. Then I went to the horrible “Windows Sync Center” (WSC) on Vista. After totally deleting the data on my phone several times, I found that WSC is totally stupid and can not sync the phone data in any intelligent way. Regardless of what option you set, the data on the computer overwrites the data on the phone, which is usually disastrous. To deal with it, you have to totally delete the sync relationship from the computer so that when you hook up the phone the computer doesn’t recognize it. Then the computer will grab the data from your phone. It’s utter crapware. On top of that, it won’t sync contacts unless you install crap-bloatware Outlook. And when you do that? Then it duplicates any contact you’ve edited on your phone since the last sync. All M$ software is crap, but Windows Mobile and associated syncing systems are utter crap. Avoid.
I do avoid. I moved to an iPhone back in mid-2008. Occasionally, Outlook even sees the phone and lets me sync my contacts. Just not recently
Fascinating. I would have jumped on that iPhone immediately but I need a hardware keyboard…I type a lot. So please tell us: What is the consensus? Is it as slick as one would hope? Is it the expected night & day difference when compared to the M$ system? Are you able to back it up to the computer smoothly?
It seems to me that the duplicate Outlook contacts (and also duplicate Outlook Tasks I just found out) problem comes from Outlook itself. Thus, if you sync your iPhone with Outlook I would expect you would still get the duplicate problem. Have you found that to be the case?
Congrats on your new phone.
Regarding your Microsoft Instructions for starting your car, here’s my version:
MICROSOFT KNOWLEDGE BASE ARTICLE: HOW TO GET YOUR RADIO TO MEMORIZE YOUR FAVORITE RADIO STATIONS.
Many of our customers have emailed us asking us about the feature on the new Microsoft Radio that allows you to instantly select your favorite radio stations. You may remember from our marketing materials that we mentioned that while competing radios typically memorize only 6 or 12 favorite stations, the Microsoft radio allows you to select an infinite number of stations. Here’s how to use this “awesome” feature.
1: Manually tune to a favorite station.
2: Jot down on a piece of paper the station frequency in mega-hertz, including the 3 places after the decimal. (to display the frequency: hold down the power button for more than 3 seconds to display a menu, then double tap the power button until you get to DSP FRQ, then go to “advanced/other/one time display/advanced/options/display station frequency)
3: Repeat steps 1 & 2 until you have recorded all of your favorite stations.
4: Now, whenever you want to tune one of your favorite stations, simply look up the frequency on your piece of paper and then manually tune the radio and enjoy!
NOTE: If the radio refuses to tune in a station, turn the radio off (if possible), stop the car, turn the engine off and then on, then turn on the radio and try again. If the problem persists, call us and pay us $30 to tell you that you’re hosed.
Larry, I thought I needed a keyboard. Then I tried the iPhone and realized I can do so many other things faster than on Windows Mobile that any time I lost typing would be made up in other ways. So I plunged in.
After getting it, I found I really could type very fast. It does tend to learn your style. I still wouldn’t want to compose a long entry on my phone, but it works much better than I expected.
Later, I tried an Android phone with a keyboard and found I actually hated having to use a keyboard rather than have a nice on-screen one.
The iPhone has a nice backup facility within iTunes. It’s worked well for me once. Crashed on me another time.
I haven’t looked into the duplicate issue with the iPhone — but I’ve also not noticed any new ones showing up.
Export all contacts.
Delete all contacts.
(sync with WM device to delete duplicates there also)
Import all contacts again, selecting: do not import duplicate items
done
Thomas:
I don’t see how that procedure you gave us is going to help. If you have duplicate items, only a manual clean up is going to fix them.
.5: Export all contacts: I’m using Outlook 2002 and it comes with these export filters: CSV (DOS), CSV (windows), dBase, Access, Excel, FoxPro, .pst, tab separated values (dos), tab separated values (windows). Fabulous! How uncharacteristically charitable of M$ to allow us to export our data to formats like csv that they don’t control thereby forcing lockin. Except! Every single one of those crashes and will not work except for .pst, an M$ controlled format. (I didn’t try dBase, or FoxPro). I use the .pst for backing up my contacts but that doesn’t get me free of the M$ mafia. The next best thing is to link to the Outlook contact store from Access and you can get your data that way, but it can’t get many of the Outlook fields that way so you only get part of your data.
1: If you delete all your contacts in Outlook on the computer and then sync with your phone, all your contacts on the phone will be deleted unless you first delete the partnership.
2: If you do delete the partnership, when you hook the phone back up and recreate the partnership, Outlook will simply reimport all contacts from the phone, duplicates and all.
3: Your advice: (sync with WM device to duplicates there also) does not make sense and won’t work under any circumstances that I can see.
4: Outlook’s “do not import duplicate items,” if it works at all, which I doubt, will only exclude exact duplicates. If the contact entries differ at all, which they will because one will be more up to date than the other, then Outlook is not smart enough to recognize them as duplicates and will go ahead and import them.
There are a variety of freebie tools available on cnet for finding and deleting the dupes. It’s not going to be easy and it will be that much harder if neither contact has the most up to date information…that will require you to merge entries. What I did was link an Access table to my Outlook contacts store and then I can use the powerful tools in Access for finding duplicate records and it’s easier/possible to scan thru the fields and figure out which record is more up to date and to copy info between the records to make one record good. You can also drop the bad records from the Access view. In spite of hating M$ and their crapware/bloatware/shovelware, I do like Access, as long as it’s not crashing or corrupting my data, which it does a lot. Just be aware that the Access linked table is not viewing all of the data in the Outlook contact record….yet another great function ruined by M$ incompetence/negligence.
Thomas come clean: You’ve never used that procedure have you?
I just put a scathing comment on the Was this advice helpful response under that advice to “In the list of contacts, press CTRL while you click each duplicate contact.| When you have selected all the duplicate contacts, press DELETE.” Only someone with a demo Contacts file with a dozen records in it would come up with such asinine “advice”.
The bloody idiot who allowed that to go out as advice (we can’t call its author an idiot as he or she must have been a juvenile at the time of writing) should be ashamed. The advice didn’t even stretch to the obvious – using the Group By option.
Thanks for this very helpful post. I’m very glad to hear this from you. I also found a useful tool called Scrubly Duplicate remover. The process is simple; it scans your Gmail contact folders and look for duplicate contacts. If Scrubly finds any exact or Compatible Contacts, it will remove or merge them automatically. They even have a back up so I can have the original copy just in case. You can also refer this for other issues. Thanks
You can also checkout http://www.scrubly.com which helps remove duplicates
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