contacts management - overwhelmed

[joe19812]

newb here, just got a new iphone. So I've always kept email contacts seperate from cell phone contacts however the only way I could find to avoid retyping all my my cell phone contacts was to sync it into Outlook with Motorola phone tools. After setting up my iphone and syncing my contacts I've got my originall cell phone contacts just as before, plus a whole mess of contacts from my email contact list. What I ended up with on my iphone is a very extensive list of incomplete contacts(email only, address only, etc) some of which haven't been used in long time that I now have to sort through to find a number.
What is the best approach to effectively managing this for an sensible phone contact list? or does everyone just have this large list of contacts and just deals with it?

 

[Dave B]

I had/have the same problem. Am using address book on the Mac to slowly trim it and get rid of duplicates etc...

Dave

 

[ert3]

I use a mac and found a script to sync entourage and address book on mac that prevents duplicates pretty well.

Its on mac-update .com and is actually named something along the lines of "sync adressbook-entourage"

 

[joe19812]

just started the tedious process of cleaning up my new all encompassing contacts list. Another caveat I've found is on my car blue tooth connection. I used to only have about 30 names to scroll though to dial a number, now I have over 200! Having all these contacts at your fingertips is both usefull and a hassle at the same time. Better living through technology

 

[Carnivor]

its definitely worth doing tho, 30 contacts aint to bad, i had a motorola piece of rubbish given to me from work, i have 200 odd contacts in my work outlook, when i sync'd i had the exact opposite problem to you, it split all my contacts up into carnivor mobile, carnivor address, carnivor email, carnivor work address, etc etc, from 200 contacts i ended up with over 800 entries in my phone, right mess, i cant be bothered to sort it out as its work, my iphone however i have taken the time to make each contact as complete as i cant get them, i does become a little obsessive, my current mission is to complete every birthday hehe

 

[joe19812]

I seemed to have found an easier way to clean up the contact list. I exported my current outlook.pst address book, the created a new one with and sync'ed my old moto phone into it so that I just have my moto phone address book in outlook. THen I synced iphone/itunes to this address book. When done, I exported this .pst file then reimported my original outlook.ps contact list. Now I can just pull in the cell phone numbers only .pst as needed to sync with the iphone.