Getting Outlook Categories in Gmail Contacts

[dlcpa]

Last night I exchanged my Storm 2 (the free one) for a Droid. It cost me $250. At first the salesperson said I had to return both phones and my wife, who was fine with the Storm2, would have to get a brand new Storm 2 and I would get the Droid.

I told him that I have about 4,000 contacts, which turned to 3741 while it was syncing from the Storm 2 (now it's 3,650 and I have no idea what's missing) and I did not want them on Google, under any circumstances. So he transferred over the information into a new Google account that he set up for me. I knew he was setting up the account but I had no idea all my contacts would be under that Gmail account. That's not what I wanted at all and I was very adverse to having so much important information floating around the Google data farms.

When I tried to filter the contacts by Outlook category, it wouldn't do it and it threw each and every contact into a group called My Contacts in the Gmail A/C. I don't even know if the Droid has a field for category. That's just great because I have about 15 categories and I don't want to have to Browse 3700 contacts if I don't remember a name and want to see all the contacts in a particular category.

So, I erased all the contacts off the card and wiped the phone clean. What do I do now? Is there going to be a way I can get the Outlook fields synced into Th Droid and not get all my contacts thrown onto Google?

These Verizon sales people are practically useless when it comes to such an important function of a phone. It's not just a little phone and they should know what it can and can not do with a program as important as Outlook. I;m pretty pissed off.

 

[tealturboser]

The Droid doesn't have Outlook. Now unless you are trying to sync the contacts from an exchange account the only way to do it is to export your Outlook contacts then import them into the phone. Check out the FAQ for more info

 

[krusty46]

I only had to transfer about 300 contacts and it was a disaster. My wife didn't use categories on that phone, but it sorts everything by first name unless I'm missing something.
In the gmail account online, it lets you sort by groups, but I'm not sure if they are Gmail specific or transferred over from Outlook. The phone is not home with me now to check.
It was not easy to do and I don't find it nearly as useful as Outlook. You might want to look at a Touch Pro2, it's a great phone and holds it's own against the Droid. That's assuming you can get the contacts back over--or do you have them sitting on a computer or exchange server someplace.

 

[dlcpa]

Storm 2 didn't have Outlook either

but you could sync the contacts, calendar, email, notes etc through Windows.

 

[Cory Streater]

I'm not really sure what it is you expected the Verizon salesperson to do when you walked in there with 4,000 contacts and switched to a completely different phone technology.

You might try exporting your contacts to a .csv file and then reimporting them into Outlook. From there you might be able to categorize them properly with a little bit of work.

Either way, in my opinion, this isn't a Verizon issue, but is more the result of going from one type of phone to another, which always has it's idiosyncrasies.

 

[dlcpa]

Krusty

There were pre-defined groups, friends, business acquaintences and a few others but I have 15 different but very usefull categories on my laptop that I want synced.

I would like to get this to work. Previously, I used a Dell X51v, a WinMo 6.0 PDA, and that syncing was a dream but the Storm 2 was pretty good too even though it didn't have a few fields, like Spouse and Spouses birthday, which I used for reunion purposes and as a way to find people years later. Outlook has numerous fields but how can the Droid or Google leave out the Categories field?

 

[dlcpa]

I'm not really sure what it is you expected the Verizon salesperson to do when you walked in there with 4,000 contacts and switched to a completely different phone technology.

You might try exporting your contacts to a .csv file and then reimporting them into Outlook. From there you might be able to categorize them properly with a little bit of work.

Either way, in my opinion, this isn't a Verizon issue, but is more the result of going from one type of phone to another, which always has it's idiosyncrasies.

8, I am the customer and I have no idea what will happen when my contacts travel from the Storm 2 to the Droid until after the transfer. I also did not want everything going to Google and sure as ____ it did. I specifically made a thing about that in the store and they said no problem. They were supposed to transfer over pictures and that wasn't done and they couldn't even swipe the Storm 2 clean, which I had to do. Verizon needs to train these people!

Outlook has a huge base. This problem isn't something I am dreaming up. They want to sell Droids. They need to address issues because people should not get trapped into finding out later that something major will not work. Jumping from one phone system to another is involved but what the hell are the sales people supposed to do if they know there could be a problem. At the very least they need to find someone in the store who knows what they don't know.

I hate getting used to new phones but this problem is a deal undoer for me and many people with have Outlook contacts.

As far as the csv file, I don't wnat to have to go to those steps because that takes too much time ..and you have to name everything correctly and who know what the Droid field names are, let alone if they have enough.

 

[Cory Streater]

I understand you're point. However, If you want to vent about Verizon's customer service, we have a specific carrier sub forum for that. And I moved your post here, because what you're asking is not Droid specific.

Thanks,

Cory

 

[dlcpa]

I understand you're point. However, If you want to vent about Verizon's customer service, we have a specific carrier sub forum for that. And I moved your post here, because what you're asking is not Droid specific.

Thanks,

Cory

Cory,

No, I don't want to vent, I am looking for an answer. How do you sync contacts with your laptop? Can you or must it on come from a phone? Maybe there's a way in that Windows sync? Doesn't Motorola have a sync?

dlcpa

 

[Zorro1]

Seen Companionlink yet?

 

[SpeedVX]

I've run into the same problem and the short answer, right now, is no - there isn't a way to sync directly from your Outlook to your Droid. The only way the Droid gets its Contact and Calendar information is directly from Google. It pulls the Calendar information from Google Calendar and Contacts from your GMail contacts.

Syncing your Outlook calendar with the Google Calendar attached to your GMail account is actually relatively painless. You just have to download a program from Google called Google Calendar Sync. It does some things with formatting in Outlook that I don't like (for some reason all the appoints that I create on my phone or in Google Calendar show up as Tentative in Outlook) but, all in all, its fairly painless.

Contacts, on the other hand, is a right mess. Here's what I did to hack my way around the problem for now. First -- I exported my Outlook contacts to a .csv and then went to GMail and imported them all. The actual importation process didn't take too long. Some of the fields didn't quite work right -- in some of the contacts home phones are now showing up on the Droid as "other" -- go figure.

I too had a lot of categories and they all showed up as "Groups" in Gmail. If you go to Contacts on the Droid, hit the Menu button, hit Display Options and then hit the > symbol next to your GMail account, it should expand to show you a list of the Groups (categories). You can then uncheck System Group: My Contacts and just hit the check mark next to the group you want to display.

Not exactly elegant, huh? For me it really didn't work at all -- I have dozens of categories -- so I'm going with a more labor intensive route.

First, I downloaded Star Contacts, which gives you the ability to search by more than just the Name field in your Contacts. You can choose to search through other fields including Company (important for me) or Note (important again).

(I've also tried aContacts which seems very good, but it keeps crashing on my Droid)

Now here's where the labor is coming in. I'm manually going through all of my contacts and putting their category name at the top of each note, with each category name preceded by a * (so as to avoid any unintended search hits -- if I'm searching through Notes for my *Art category for instance, it won't show up every single time the word art shows up in a note). I'm also creating a master category list which I'm keeping as a word document on my phone (can be read on Documents To Go) so I can easily peruse the list. Then, when I want to pull up a category, I just search the Note field for that particular category and the full list shows up.

I'm not dealing with as many contacts as you are (only about 1200) so I don't know if this is the kind of solution that you want to deal with, but so far its the best one I've come up with. Also, since you have 15 categories, maybe just using the Display Options function will work for you. Of course, that depends on the Groups showing up correctly in GMail as well.

As for direct syncing with your computer, CompanionLink doesn't do it yet. Right now the software goes through Google, so all your information ends up in the cloud anyway. Their website does say they are working on a USB solution, so hopefully it'll show up soon. Mark/Space is also working on a direct computer to phone sync called The Missing Sync. They have a public beta up now, but it doesn't do much for Andriod 2.0 (just media I think). Version 1.0 of the software is expected to be able to sync contacts and some other things (calendar is coming later).

But, once again, I think we're going to be left high and dry on the Category front. I think that's a limitation that's just inherent in the phone. I keep hoping that a real full-featured PIM like PocketInformant or Agendus will show up, but from what I'm reading in their forums it doesn't seem likely anytime soon.

Hope this helps.

 

[woodsb123]

Getting Outlook categories into Gmail Contacts

I'm no genious, but, here is what I'm currently using and it wirelessly syncs Outlook with all of my Gmail Info, contacts, calendar, email, etc from my pc to my HTC Android Eris phone, I'm sure that it would also work for the Droid. Just go to the link below and take a look to see it would also work for you. It doesn't automatically pull your Outlook contact groups over, however, once it pulls all of your contacts to Gmail, you can setup the groups in Gmail to be identical to your groups in Outlook. Hope this helps

daveswebsite.com/software/gsync/

 

[KitC]

I have a samsung moment and want to export my contact photos from outlook 2007 to my gmail account or better yet to the phone directly. Can this be done? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[eregitano]

I synced all of my outlook email, calender and contacts to my droid last night via exchange server. Simply choose "corporate email" entered in the login and server info, and just like that all my email, contacts and calender are pushed to the phone in real time. No GMAIL involvement at all.