Best place to ask for help managing contacts?

Hi, I am not sure the best place here to ask for help with organizing, merging, and managing contacts.

I use Windows Mail to do most emailing (I installed this using the tutorials here). I use the "contacts" tab there to take email addresses and I have created a few "groups." I also have hotmail and gmail and comcast email accounts and rarely use those for email but thing that I have synced the contacts. I also just got an old iPhone and had the store sync my phone contacts from my old unsmart phone. I used iTunes to back that up and it synced with my hard drive contacts folder. In the old days, I used a simple Word doc table to organize my address book and used to print it out using mail merge and make my own address books.

So, I have important addresses in a Word table, email addresses and some other contact info (if I somehow got those vcard things) in my windows contacts. Now the contacts also has the phone book from my old phone. This is a total mess and I have multiple entries for people in contacts, email entries and now the phone book merge. And also now the contacts in the iPhone have all these old email addresses that I don't want there. It takes 4 steps to delete a contact directly from the "contacts" app on the iPhone (or at least that is the only way I know how to do it) and I haven't figured out how to manage them in iTunes. I have probably 100 unwanted contacts on the iPhone now all mixed in with the important ones.

What total contact chaos! I have no idea how to make this all manageable. I need to find an easy way to get one entry for each person and have as many as 5 for some people: their email address contact, cell phone, home phone (both from old cell phone), and line in my Word table with address and more.

I have opened the contacts folder in "Libraries" and then tried to put one on top of the other but that doesn't work. When I click on a contact, it opens up a window to enter information. I would have to cut and paste or retype all the info and then delete one when I have duplicates. I don't find that entry screen very user friendly. The overall contacts screen is also very hard to use.

I would appreciate any suggestions and ideas to manage all this within Windows somehow. Or should I just start over and enter each person by typing the info?

If I should delete this and repost it somewhere else on this site, let me know, I didn't see a subforum for contacts. Thanks.

Ok easiest way, have you made a live account in Windows Live Mail?
If not do so, when you do so on WLM it will take the contacts you have there and sync them with WLM
If you already have a WLM all your contacts should be under that account.

On the iphone, make an account for your windows live mail account
If you have several accounts on iphone, the WLM one will bring in the contacts. If you click on this account to use, it basically becomes the primary. Everytime you make a change in WLM on your desktop it should make the change and sync it on the iphone.

I have 8 WLM programs on 8 computers (one for each computer) and i have an iphone
I am signed in with my windows live mail
Now when I make a change or add a group, it syncs it over to the the other computers
Hope this helps

vassar89: I see now why you are trying to move to Outlook-tomanage the duplicate contacts.

I've suffered the very same thing - many sources, many contacts. Some are duplicates, some are partials. Trying to get all of the inforamtion from all of the dups/parts into one entry is a formidable task. Different data (phone #'s, addresses) - determining which data is current only adds to the issue. I have not found any software that neatly solves this, so I ended up living with the duplicates, fixing them one-at-a-time, then simply backing up my contacts, deleting them from whatever client I was using (OE, WM, or WLM) and starting over with only the most important entries.

As eMail came in, I would add the contact information from the msg and if I thought it important enough, I would dig out the backup and enter the current phone # and address info. I went from over 900 contacts (most real, not dups) to about 80 (current friends, family and clients). If I want to drum up some business, I have to dig, but then there's the issue of "are they current".

It is a sticky wicket.

Bill
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