Help Contacts, duplicates, and several accounts, Oh my!!

[Stockmoose16]

Ok, so maybe I'm the only one who has run into this problem, but I doubt it. I am overwhelmed by the contact organization system on my inc. I don't understand it at all, actually.

I have the following accounts linked to my phone:

1) Exchange Account (using Touchdown App)
2) Gmail account (using gmail app)

Somehow, all my Exchange contacts have now landed in my Google contacts. How did this happen?! And how do I fix this?

Moreover, I have over 4,500 contacts in my Exchange account, and I simply don't understand how the phone displays these. Since I'm using touchdown, which has its own contacts tab, will these same contacts show up when I hit the "people" widget? I can't tell if this widget is getting populated by my gmail acct (which now has my 4500 contacts in it) or if it's coming from Touchdown.

Another annoyance is that I don't want to look through 4500 contacts to find the 10 or so people I regularly call or email. Is there a way to make it so only a select few show in the "people" tab, rather than all 4500?

I just had to hard reset my phone and I had a group of 15 people that was saved in my google account for text messaging purposes. When I restored the phone, only 10 people were left in the group, the other names weren't even in my "people" widget anymore. How did it decide which 10 people to save? And why did I lose those 5 people from my "people" widget?

What is the difference between putting a tab as a "phone" contact, Exchange contact, or google contact? It seems that they are all linked somehow. I don't understand how to back it up properly.

Bottom line: If someone can concisely answer these questions, it would probably help a lot of people.

THANKS!

 

[Terabethia]

Before you try this, keep in mind this will remove ALL of the contacts from the program you want to unsync. There is no way to pick and choose.

Go to menu and then Accounts & Sync. Under manage accounts you should see the ones that you have added.

If you click on one, it will open a new menu where you can choose what options you want to sync. For example, under Google I can choose calendar, contacts and GMail.

Personally I just turned off everything and manually put the contacts that I want into the phone.

 

[Terabethia]

Oh yea... groups.

If you go into the actual contact for each person, click on edit. From there you can assign them a group. There are some preloaded on the phone such as Favorites, Family, CoWorkers, etc.

Just assign the 10-20 people you dial most often to your "favorite" group and then go there when you need to make a call. Much easier than scrolling through 4500 contacts.

Though as I said, I would turn off ALL the contact syncing and just manually add the contacts you want on your phone... will take a little time up front but save a lot of headache in the future.