Blog

January 4th, 2011 by Gwynne Monahan

#cliotraining Tuesday Tip: Google Sync & Merging of Duplicates

Contacts. The life blood of your practice. You get referrals from them, solutions to problems, new marketing and website ideas and sometimes a good chuckle. And you collect new contacts at conferences, networking events, dinners and other gatherings.

Odds are good you sync your address book across devices so you always have contact information handy. You might even enter contacts into your smart phone right away, collect a business card anyway only to forget and put the contact in again at a later date.

Enter the Duplicate Problem. You now have two entries for the same person, and perhaps two entries for many of the same people. But how to tell? And how to fix all of them?

This is where Gmail comes in handy, especially if you use Google with Clio since you’ll also want a clean contact list in Clio.

To clean up your contacts by merging duplicates, click the “Contacts” link in Gmail. If you’re using Google Apps for Your Domain, a screen like this appears:

Image from Official Gmail Blog

Now click “Find duplicates” and Gmail comes back with a list of names and a number in () next to each name with a duplicate. If you want to check the information, click the “Details” button. If everything looks good, or you just want to get rid of the duplicates, click “Merge” and poof! Duplicates are gone, and you’re left with a clean contact list.

If you are just using Gmail, and not Google Apps for Your Domain, you can still perform a merge and clean up your contacts. Click the “Contacts” link, click the “More actions” button and then select “Find & merge duplicates…” You’ll get a list of names with () for duplicates, and you can check the information under “Details” before clicking “Merge” to clean up your contacts.

Now you have a clean contact list. Clean sync across devices. Clean sync with Clio. Hours saved. A good start to the New Year!

And you can find more information on merging contacts on Google’s Official Gmail Blog, along with plenty of other helpful tips.

Also, be sure to check out our Clio Sync for Google section for syncing contacts, calendar and Google Apps.