Problems with Contacts

[harbottled]

OK......Here goes......... This newbie has alot of questions so I apologize in advance.........
I just got my Hero last night. The Sprint sales guy transferred all my contacts, calendar, etc. over for me. So now, I'm playing around and notice that all my contacts are messed up. I have duplicates, some contacts merged with other contacts, missing info, etc. What happened?? When I go to gmail contacts, they all look fine so why are they so messed up on my phone? Is there an easy fix? It would take forever to manually go thru and fix all of them individually.
Should I be using Google Sync or HTC Sync? Both? I can't seem to find the download for Google Sync for HTC Hero/Android.
Is there a way to pull all of my Facebook contacts to my phone?
As far as duplicate calendar entries, I noticed that all 4 calendars were checked, PC calendar, one listed as my name, one called My Calendar and Facebook calendar. That's probably why I have duplicate entries but I don't know which one to choose. What's the difference between PC, My Calendar and the other one listed as my name calendar?
Well, that's enough for now......don't want to wear out my welcome!! BTW, I did search for these answers first but had no luck.

 

[doesgo]

I'm no expert by any means, but since I've just been dealing with this (had my Hero for a week or so) I might be able to help. A little.

Not sure about merged contacts (still researching that one myself), but you have several sources of contact info, just like the several sources of calendar info you discovered. You can turn some or all of them on or off at your choosing, and they can be linked with each other as well (at least the contacts can, not sure yet about calendars).

I used HTC Sync to get contacts and calendar info off my PC's Outlook program and it worked fine, but then I discovered gmail is much, much better, so I dumped all my "phone" contacts, went to gmail on my PC, entered all my contacts there, and they automatically sync with my Hero. It's awesome, because it's SO much faster to enter contact info on a PC than a smartphone. So I now have no "phone" contacts, only Google and Facebook, and many of those are linked together.

Now I'm working on cleaning out my phone calendar and doing all my calendaring via gmail. I think PC calendar is appointments added from a PC via HTC Sync. I think the two different calendars you can find in the menu are the same thing, but you can toggle on and off appontments made via the various methods (google, FB, manually, PC, etc.). You can even add (and then toggle) holidays, etc.

As long as you've set up the Facebook app on your phone, it should find all your Facebook friends and add them to that portion of your contacts list. Go to the "People" widget, then click "Menu" and then "View" and you can toggle which contact categories you want to show by default.

Hope that helps some.