Multipage selection buggy on Google Contacts

Copy-and-paste from my writing at Google Help forum.

Summary: if you want to do an operation on contacts scattered on multiple pages, you may run into problems — so move to 250 contacts per page (the maximum).

Say you have 75 contacts. You configured Gmail to have only 50 contacts per page. Consequently, your contacts will be splitted in two pages (1-50 on page 1 and 51-75 on page 2).

Now, you want to export 4 contacts. 3 of them are on page 1, the fourth one is on page 2. You can check the fourth boxes; Google Contacts (or is Chrome? Or is it OS X?) remembers which boxes you checked for every page, which is good… and bad, because it will spread confusion, read further.

The problem arises when you want to export these contacts. Click on export and select “Selected Contacts”. If you were on page 1 when you asked for exportation, the counter will tell you there is 3 contacts to export. If you were on page 2, it will tell you there is 1 contact to export. This is because, even if Google Contacts/Chrome/OS X is able to remember the checked boxes, the script for actually counting the selected contacts is not able to remember.

Unfortunately, this is not just a display bug. It will export the contacts on the page, not the whole selection!

Worse, the same bug happens with group creation. If the contacts you want to select are on different pages, Google Contacts will only add the contacts on the active page into the group. So, if you want to add contacts from different pages to one group, you have to select all contacts on one page, add them to the group, move to the next page and start the process again.

Now, there are two questions here:
- What is responsible for the “remember checked boxes across pages”, interface-level, behaviour? Chrome or OS X (so, unrelated to Google Contacts) or Google Contacts itself? In other words, is this behaviour an artifact or a part of the problem?
- The script-level lack of memory at the across pages has to be fixed.

Two interfaces for contacts

There are two contacts interfaces, with different features:

• the “embedded one”, which is default for Google personal, is the most powerful and is the one I recommend.
  Address is: https://mail.google.com/mail/#contacts
• the “dedicated one”, which is default for Google Apps and has less features (no exporting of individual address). Until recently (12th of April 2011?), it was the only one available for Google Apps (one reason why I wrote that Google Apps standard may be less interesting than Google Apps personal). Fortunately, you can now switch to the one above, the “embedded one” (you can access the dedicated interface with Gmail regular too, but why bother?).
  Address is: https://www.google.com/contacts/?tab=mC

Be sure to use the first one. It is more powerful and is keyboard shortcut-compatible (provided you activated the shortcut in settings, you can compose a new mail by hitting c with the embedded interface, something you cannot do with the dedicated interface. Plus, it is simpler for Gmail user, because this is what they know the best. Really, there is only two good thing to consider:

• Its three-panel layout
• Newly-created contacts default to the selected group. In Gmail regular, newly created contact default to My Contacts, which make it hard to properly organize contacts.

Again: don’t use the dedicated interface.

I asked for a merge at Google Help forum, where Google employees wander and sometimes honour requests.

Google Contacts’ CSV syntax

Google gives only sparse information about Google contacts’ syntax (I need it for converting various Outlook files). And I did not find any reliable information on the web about its syntax.

So, I braced myself and “reversed-engineered” it. Below is the result. Since Blogger doesn’t allow inline overflow, you suggest you take a look at the spreadsheet version.

Name                 ,Given Name,Additional Name,Family Name   ,Yomi Name,Given Name Yomi,Additional Name Yomi,Family Name Yomi,Name Prefix   ,Name Suffix   ,Initiales,Nickname  ,Short Name,Maiden Name,Birthday  ,Gender,Location,Billing Information,Directory Server,Mileage,Occupation,Hobby,Sensitivity,Priority,Subject,Notes,Group Membership             ,E-mail 1 - Type,E-mail 1 - Value       ,E-mail 2 - Type,E-mail 2 - Value,Phone 1 - Type ,Phone 1 - Value,Phone 2 - Type    ,Phone 2 - Value                   ,Phone 3 - Type    ,Phone 3 - Value   ,Phone 4 - Type         ,Phone 4 - Value    ,Address 1 - Type,Address 1 - Formatted              ,Address 1 - Street,Address 1 - City,Address 1 - PO Box,Address 1 - Region,Address 1 - Postal Code,Address 1 - Country,Address 1 - Extended Address ,Organization 1 - Type,Organization 1 - Name,Organization 1 - Yomi Name,Organization 1 - Title,Organization 1 - Department,Organization 1 - Symbol,Organization 1 - Location,Organization 1 - Job Description,Website 1 - Type,Website 1 - Value  ,Custom Field 1 - Type,Custom Field 1 - Value
Sir Wile E. Coyote Sr,Wile      ,Ethelbert      ,Coyote        ,         ,               ,                    ,                ,Sir           ,Sr            ,W.E.C.   ,The Coyote,Coyote    ,           ,1949-09-16,M     ,          ,                 ,                ,       ,          ,     ,           ,        ,       ,Notes,* My Contacts ::: Other group,Home           ,mail@perso.org         ,* Work         ,mail@pro.com    ,Home           ,01 22 22 22 22 ,Mobile            ,06 55 55 55 55                    ,Work              ,01 55 55 55 55    ,Work Fax               ,01 55 55 55 56     ,Work            ,Route 66 - Sonoran Desert - Arizona,Route 66          ,Sonoran Desert  ,                  ,Arizona           ,                  ,U.S.A                   ,Shout “BEEP-BEEP” to find him,                     ,ACME inc.            ,                          ,Honorary member       ,User experience            ,                       ,Delaware                 ,Involuntary beta-tester         ,Work            ,http://www.acme.com

And tada!

(please note the lack of picture is voluntary: a CSV cannot embed a picture of if it can, I don’t know how to do it. Also, the Etherlbert middle name does not appear on the vCard, but it is here—I checked)

Please share and correct.

Import Outlook Contacts to Google Contacts

There is a lot of instructions on the Web, but none truly worked for me (either incomplete or blatantly wrong). Here’s how I did it:

What you’ll need

• A spreadsheet (I used Excel 2011 out of lazyness; I should have tried Google Spreadsheet).
• A Grep-capable text editor (EditPadPro on Windows (Notepad++ is not that great), Coda on Mac (TextWrangler should be OK too; it is just pretty old interface-wise)).

Preparation

First, save your Outlook contact as a CSV file (I’ll assume you either know or will find out). Then open it up in your text editor. And let the fun begin.

Before any exhaustive editing, we have to make this CSV file readable. This start by configuring the text editor properly, by having soft wrap off and line numbering on.

Then, we will start working on the file itself. We want to make sure one entry is exactly equal to one (hard) line. Why do we have to check? Because postal addresses line usually come with carriage returns. This is all well and good when reading an actual business card, but when editing a CSV file, this is just plain tough. Even worse, it will make your spreadsheet program (see later) going crazy with the file. Plus, Google will know when to have the carriage return back after import. So, remove any extraneous carriage return. In the end, one entry should equal one hard line. Double-check this, it may be pretty tough to check on a long CSV file (180 addresses for me).

Filtering

OK, now we have a passable CSV file to work on. Time for the real thing. Two are of particular importance and should not be oversighted:

• Remove the first column (name) because it is unusable and its informations are available elsewhere; the first column is just a concatenation of other columns with no added value (well, it is possible to add some specific value, but most people won’t do it and that’s good for us they don’t).
• Rename the column Name Prefix into Title. I have yet to see someone correctly inputing Mr. here; most people use this field for job’s title. If it doesn’t show up in Outlook, it does a lot in Google Contacts. Trust me, you don't want job’s titles in lieu of name prefixes. Associate manager for Europe Bertrand duGué is simply unreadable. Bertrand duGué (Associate manager for Europe) is much, much better! If you don’t believe me, trust your boss to tell you!

These are the two most important things to consider for mere importing. The rest will be about optimising.

Optimisation

Did you notice how people don’t know how to write? Looks like their caps-lock is locked. Full caps reigns supreme…

Here comes the spreadsheet. Its main advantages are formulæ (I’m sure Grep gurus may go without a spreadsheet, but I can’t) and… tadam! proper column display (it’s hard to figure out columns of text only with semi-colons as separators).

Add columns at the right of each one you want to sanitize and use the =PROPERCASE(A1) function (change A1 accordingly, of course); yes, I know, PROPERCASE is not perfect; that’s what manual editing if for. As for the e-mail field, I used the =LOWERCASE(A1) formula instead.

While we’re a it, we can also mass change various typos (like the ones PROPERCASE generated). Some spreadsheet programs may allow regular expressions during this process. Excel doesn't, so I just switched back to my text editor. I made sure all mails and phones where moved from other to work, I removed the parenthesis around the leading phone digits (this code works for French formatting: \(([0-9]{2})\)) and did some other things (mostly manual there). Anyway, this is your chance for batch editing.

Conclusion

Scrap the name column and rename Name prefix as Title. If you do that, your import should work well (at least with an Outlook 2007 CSV export). The rest is just taking advantage of being in a editing process. Your customer would probably not care for the rest as long as the first two part are done well.

Of course, it won’t work the first time. You’ll have to do it several times until it becomes second nature. This may look like an easy thing, but it took me five hours to have it work. Hopefully, now that you have this tutorial, you’ll import your file much faster, right?

On Google Contacts

When entering a new contact’s email address, Google will automatically scan its database to check if this user has a public profile with a picture. If s/he does, then it will be displayed on the contact entry. Neat!

This picture won’t show up as a thumbnail in list view, though.

Why Google Apps Standard may be less interesting than Google personal

• Some services are unavailable.
  • Impossible to transfert ownership of a document to an address outside of domain.
  • Despite numerous transitions, somes services are still not available (Google Buzz and probably Google Health too).
  • (update 2011/03/31) No sorting by family name in Apps version of Google Contacts. Only default sorting (by first name) is available. Gmail regular's interface has finally did it in Google Apps.
  • Email recovery is not available (source). This is a minor annoyance, since an administrator can still use reset the password.
  • dot-insensitivity does not work in Google Apps (david.latapie is the same as davidlatapie ou davi.dla.tap.ie in Gmail; no so in Google Apps)
• Google personal may emulate Google Apps Standard.
  • Inbound mail address: use an alias at your mail provider.
  • Outbound mail address: Gmail may send as another address.
• Some handy things can't be completely emulated though.
  • Sharing a document with the whole domain can't be done. A solution is to use address book (manual autocompletion doesn't work; only clicking on select in my contacts does).