Newbie Question - any way to consolidate contacts?

[Vance]

Hello!

My boss got a Curve, and was upgrading from a Treo. The first thing we did was transfer his Palm Desktop contacts (mostly just phone numbers from his Treo) into Outlook (mostly just email addresses). This created a lot of double and even triple entries. Is there any way that the BB can consolidate all the contact information into one Contact as long as they are exactly the same name? My Droid did that automatically when pulling together my contacts from various sources, so I am hoping that BB can as well.

Another approach would be to do this somehow in Outlook, which would then sync over to the BB, correct?

[aiharkness]

Wirelessly posted (8820)

Don't think the blackberry would do it. Not so far as I know. I thought Outlook would prompt to combine, and that's what I would look at.

[aiharkness]

Wirelessly posted (8820)

By the way, the blackberry has an address book option to allow duplicate names. I've always left it set to no and never experimented. You could play with that setting and see what happens. You can always clear the blackberry address book and start over if you have to.

[Trimix]

To answer the second part of your question, yes you could do the corrections/edits in Outlook and then sync it over to BB. Probably the most straightforward way though it might be a bit time consuming depending on the amount of contacts that need to be consolidated.

[takeshi]

I'd recommend Googling for solutions using Outlook if you don't get a suitable response here.

[Vance]

Thanks, guys! Yes, I think I will have to work from the Outlook end. The problem is that my boss has over 2500 contacts right now (a lot of which are duplicates, of course), so the manual fix will be time-consuming. But I have found there are programs that will do it, and some may even automate it.

It seems that it should have asked to consolidate them as they were imported, but since we used a third party tool to do the Palm-to-Outlook transfer it never came up.

[aiharkness]

Wirelessly posted (8820)

Good luck. What I've experienced with Outlook is adding a contact with same name as an existing entry, and Outlook prompts to combine or whatever. I've never observed anthing along the lines of Outlook automatically going through the database and consolidating entries. But sounds like you found something to help. Post your lessons learned when you have time.