Comments on: Dealing With Outlook’s Duplicate Contacts

By: ryan

ryan — Thu, 26 May 2011 22:12:41 +0000

You can also checkout http://www.scrubly.com which helps remove duplicates

By: Chris Smith

Chris Smith — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 01:34:26 +0000

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

By: Simon

Simon — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:35:22 +0000

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.

By: Larry Brown

Larry Brown — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:32:32 +0000

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?

By: Thomas

Thomas — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:41:01 +0000

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

By: Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:48:11 +0000

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.

By: Larry Brown

Larry Brown — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:00:41 +0000

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.

By: Larry Brown

Larry Brown — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:48:27 +0000

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.

By: Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:39:19 +0000

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

By: Larry Brown

Larry Brown — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:06:30 +0000

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.