[Asphyx]

This is supposed to serve as a Semi Tutorial for dealing with the way Droid handles Contacts.

First thing to understand is the phone can have multiple sources (Accounts) of contacts and neither will show up in any other account.

That means your facebook contacts will not show up in GMail and GMail will not show up on Yahoo or Linked In etc...ad infinitum and MUCH Nauseum!

If your like me and my co worker you don't want to have 5 different contact lists to meddle through you want them all in one MASTER LIST which is how they are going to display on the phone!

There are:
Phone Contacts (Usually listed as Unknown Source)
GMail Contacts
LinkedIn Contacts
Facebook Contacts
Your other SocNet Contacts
And in many cases they will appear as seperate until you LINK accounts into one PHONE Contact.

So the first hurdle is to get ALL of your known contacts into a Master list that other Accounts can be LINKED to. (If you look at a contact you will see a dropdown for linked profiles on each contact telling you the sources linked to that entry!)

Step 1 Making the Master Contact list.
First thing you need to do is export contacts from every account you tie the phone to.

Backup Assistant - If you had your carrier transfer the contact list from an old phone then they probably used a backup program (VZW calls it BU Assistant). This transfers the contact list from the old phone to a server (similar to GMail) and it places those contacts into the PHONE contact profile (may say unknown). They will not be in GMail Contacts just the phone itself. You will need to go to your carrier's site and export the contacts from their site if you have done this. Save it to a folder and call it BUA.csv. Make sure you export into CSV format.

Google - Simply go to GMail and export all the contacts to CSV format. Save it in a folder and call it GMail.csv

Outlook - Go to File Import and Export and pick export to a file. Select CSV format and save it as Outlook.csv.

Facebook (and other Social Networking sites) - Facebook does not have an export contact function. But Yahoo Mail has a tool that will import a few Social networking sites into Yahoo contacts including Facebook. Use the tools (found in YMail itself) to export all the SocNet accounts you want to tie the phone to and then Export them to CSV from Yahoo.

Yahoo - Simply go to Yahoo and use the Export to CSV feature, Name it Yahoo.csv but do the SocNet export before you do this, no point in exporting it twice.

Step 2 - Merging the Sources and creating one List
Now that you have all the CSVs for your contacts it is time to pick what is going to be the master editor for your contacts in the future.

I picked Outlook but Gmail will work just as well.

Import the CSV's from all the other sources (exclude outlook if you pick that, exclude gmail if you decide to use gmail as the master list.)

You can remove duplicates from this master list now, don't worry about any information that is in the duplicate being lost that will be dealt with later, just make sure there is never more than one contact entry per person.

Once you have a clean slate your halfway home! lol

Now if you edited this master list in google sync up and when finished go to contacts.

Step 3 - Remove the Dupes

There you will see dupes again but they are not really dupes, they are the one offs that you deleted and have returned because of a SocNet (like Facebook) or other account being tied to the phone.

Open one of those dupes, hit the menu button and press the link button link it to the duplicate. Do this for each Duplicate that exists for that person. Doesn't really matter which direction you go here, the dupes will be merged into a single PHONE contact and list all the sources that contributed to the contact under the linked profiles.

Once you have gone through the entire list you should be dupe free but you will have to link contacts whenever you make new connections on SocNets. If you add contacts in the phone itself they will be saved into the Google Contact list automatically. But only if YOU add them, not if Facebook or any SocNet adds them!

For those interested in using Outlook as the Master list I recommend Android Manager WiFi. Works well and syncs files to SD card as well! NO WIRES!

The Calendar sync does not work yet (at least on my D2G version of Android) but it will sync the contacts from your outlook.

If you go that route then when your done export the contacts into GMail and go through linking any dups again so that you will wind up with 3 or 4 linked profiles in the same contact.

Then you will have linked just about every source into a single master contact! And have a handy backup available on GMail as well.

I hope this helps some of those who have contacts that have been clouded over by the way Droid handles contacts and accounts.