Gmail – Cleaning up Gmail contacts

formattinggmailgoogle-contacts

I am currently in the act of cleaning up the contacts on my Gmail account.
I have to replace all the numbers with "04" at the beginning to +61 444 444 444 but most of them are in the format such as 0444444444. Instead of manually opening each one and improving the format of each number, is there a quicker and efficient way of doing this? I have roughly around 2000 contacts.

Best Answer

Export your contacts

  1. Go the Contacts part of Gmail (or go to contacts.google.com
  2. Open the "More" menu
  3. Choose "Export..."
  4. Choose the contacts to export (a particular group or All; you might want to start with a small group at first)
  5. Choose the format to use. Google.csv is probably best to avoid incompatibility issues
  6. Download the file

Edit your contacts

  1. First, make a copy of the file. That way if something gets messed up you can always import the original
  2. Use a text editor to find-and-replace what it is you want to change. I use Notepad++, but you can use just about anything; even notepad.exe is probably fine for this, as long as it doesn't mess up the carriage returns
  3. Save the file

Import your contact data

This will require a leap of faith, because you probably want to delete all of the contacts out of Gmail (or, at least, the ones you downloaded). If you don't, this will still work, but you'll want to merge your duplicates, and you'll end up with contacts that have both the "new" and "old" phone numbers

  1. Check the "select all" checkbox to select all the contacts. If you've only exported and edited a subset, only select them. Delete them.
  2. Open the "More" menu
  3. Choose "Import..."
  4. Import the file you edited

Et voilà!

p.s., Of course, instead you could actually make your contacts do all the work themselves. I've had mixed results.

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