Confused about contacts

[Das_Jeeb]

I got my Desire this morning and imported all my contacts over from the sim card to the phone, but when I copied the contacts over a lot of the names got screwed up - for example, if i know two people called Patrick i'd maybe put Patrick (Uncle) and Patrick (Work). Quite antiquated I know but the Desire seems to think that (Uncle) for example is the surname and the phonebook is generally untidy.

As well as this I got the duplicate problem as described in this thread, so I created a Gmail account and synced all my contacts to it with a view to then deleting one or both of the phone/sim contacts.

I've set the people app to show the phone records, but, and this is what's confusing me, when I go to edit a contact to correct the name, for example, it says that the phone contact is linked to the Google contact or vice-versa and what is actually displayed in 'people' doesn't change after editing- ie the contact is still back to front.

I'm quite prepared to go through my phonebook and update all the names necessary, but I can't seem to even successfully update one. Can anyone advise? I suspect i'm overcomplicating this.

Thanks

Edit: I'm managing to update the phone contacts and then tell it to use the phone contact name as the display name, but the Google name still isn't updating - next time the device syncs, is it going to put things back as they were or update my gmail with the correct details?

 

[dlemma]

Yep, you're a bit overcomplicating it
Android will automatically "link" the contacts that he thinks refer to the same contact. In fact, if you open a contact that has been linked you notice in the top right an icon representing this link.
Click on it and you get in the detail screen, where you can decide to un-link or to do additional links, as well as to choose under which name you want to save the contact.

 

[Das_Jeeb]

Cool, thanks. I guess my question is really them once I've edited all the phone contacts To how I what them displayed, is it possible to then update the linked contacts automatically, and then sync the properly named contacts with my gmail account?

 

[dlemma]

Well, the link is only on your Android device, it will not affect the different accounts the contact info is coming from.
In fact, if you want to edit a contact that has been linked, you will be prompted to choose which contact you want to modify.
So any change you will do, it will affect only the account (gmail/exchange/etc) that you have selected to modify

 

[Das_Jeeb]

I'm pretty anal about stuff like this - i've edited all my phone contacts now to show how I want them, but obviously the linked Google contacts are still all messed up.

Is it possible to basically delete the google contacts from leaving just the phone contacts? If so i'd like to do that, clear the contacts from my gmail account and then re-sync the device so it all matches up nicely

 

[Das_Jeeb]

Got it sorted - cleared out the old Google contacts, exported the properly labelled contacts to the SD card, deleted my sim contacts then synced my Google contacts to the phone. No duplicates, everything linked. Happy days.