Mountain View, California — Managing your contacts can be a pretty irksome task, especially when you have multiple instances of your contacts scattered all over the place. Global search leader Google, earlier this week introduced a new feature Gmail dubbed as contact manager that searches for duplicate contacts and then lets you instantly merge duplicate contacts with the press of a button.
If you have imported contacts from other applications, such as Outlook or Thunderbird, or moved from another webmail service such as Hotmail, it is possible that many of your contacts have duplicate entries. Previously, users had to screen through their address book one at a time — a process that could be both tedious and time-consuming.
At the Official Gmail Blog, now states that all the backbreaking work can now be forgotten. Now, you can merge all duplicate contacts with a single click. Present in your contacts is a “Got duplicate contacts?” section. By clicking “Find duplicates” you can easily see a list of all contacts that appear more than once. You can then click “details” by each one to see a preview of what the proposed merge would look like. On the list, you can then select which ones you do or do not want merged. It is pretty simple, and works very well.
Gmail’s new merge tool can get rid of all your dupes at once. (Credit: CNET)
“Managing a big address book can be a daunting task, so it is no surprise that the top request for Google contacts is a fast, easy way to merge duplicate contacts,” says software engineer for Gmail, Dominik Marcinski.
The new application performs a simple check on your contacts, and offers a single-button solution that will combine the information for each contact. This is a non-catastrophic method, and the same that is carried out each time you run the normal duplicate checker. Contacts with multiple e-mail addresses just show up as the same contact in Gmail’s auto-complete suggestions.
You can analyze the merge suggestions and un-check any of Google’s suggestions that you do not actually want merged. Then, just hit the merge button, and you are all done.
Google is encouraging the new tool as a way to take contact lists that have been imported from elsewhere, including mobile phones or other e-mail services, and shrink them down into something more manageable. The company also says it was one of the top-requested features by its users.
“If you have been considering getting all your contacts into Gmail or syncing your Gmail contacts to your phone, now is the time to do it,” says Marcinski.
Gmail contacts can be synchronized among a variety of instruments, including those which run on Android, iPhones, BlackBerry, and SyncML. “So if you were dreading spending hours getting your contacts in order, now you can do it with a couple clicks,” Marcinski adds.