Google Contacts get tweaked

For those of you out there who are using Google Apps in your business (or personal Gmail accounts for that matter), you’ve probably run into a few limitations when it comes to managing contacts. This week, Google has made a few changes that will make you a little happier.

First up is the ability to merge two or more contacts into one. This is great, especially if you’re finding a bunch of duplicate entries after you’ve migrated from some other email system or forget you have someone’s phone number already and create a new contact for their email without checking first.

Next up is removing the group that was called Suggested Contacts. I know this caused some confusion for a few people in the past and others just thought it was inconvenient to have people they email not be automatically in their My Contacts list. All that was done is Google created an All Contacts group that includes all your contacts and also anyone you’ve recently sent or received a message from who isn’t in your contacts. So, in short, they took the feature of the suggested contacts appended your existing contacts to it to make a comprehensive list. While there are some grumbles about this making it harder to find those contacts Google is suggesting, it does help greatly in using the afore mentioned merge feature to get rid of duplicates. And while you can’t just click on Suggested Contacts anymore, you can get to that shorter list by clicking on My Contacts and click the View Suggestions button.

For those of you who have any of the supported devices that will sync your Google contacts to your mobile device, this next feature might help with your sanity. The service that syncs the contacts to your device takes all of the contacts that are listed in you My Contacts group. The problem before has been that this list included all of your contacts, so if you have hundreds from your company, your mobile device would have that huge list as all. Well now the My Contacts group is just like any other group you create in your contacts. So you can remove this “label” from any of the contacts you don’t want synced and presto! your mobile device contacts have gotten to be more manageable.

The final change is something many have been complaining to Google about for years - searching contacts. Before, you could only search for what was in the first and last name and email address fields. Now the search includes includes company names, phone numbers, notes fields, and mailing addresses.