Gadgetory

if your Android phones address book is a mess of duplicate contacts and entries with no phone number I'm going to show you how to clean it up with a few simple tricks the first trick is to D dupe your contact list if you have the same person listed on your phone three or four times this is going to merge them all together go to contacts at Google calm on your computer and sign in with the same Google Account use on your phone you should see your phone's contacts over on the left under my contacts if you see more contacts on your phone than on Google it's probably because another app or account is adding them in there we'll get to that later but for now just hit the more button in Google contacts and select find and merge duplicates Google will show you a list of all your duplicate contacts which you can merge with one click or expand to evaluate more carefully you can also manually merge contacts by checking the box by the names and selecting merge contacts from the more menu that same menu can be used to individually delete any contacts without names or numbers that are just junking up your list once you've made those changes go back to your phone manually refresh the account on your settings and you should see a cleaner happier contact list but we can still do better when we looked at your account settings before you may have noticed a lot of other accounts that are synced to your phone maybe it's another Google account maybe a Facebook account or Yahoo all of them could be contributing to the clutter to relieve some of the pain let's dive into the settings of your contacts app nearly every phone I've seen arranges things differently so you'll have to do a little exploring on your own what you should find though are some toggles for controlling what accounts are displayed on your list the little digging you also find the checkbox that filters out any contacts that don't have phone numbers that's a big one for me I also find that the contact stored on my SIM card which came from my old phone compete with the contacts I have in Google in most cases you can find the setting that hides the sim contacts try that and see if that helps now at this point you may be wondering can't I just get an app that does all this stuff for me yes there are hundreds of them the problem is do you really trust those app developers with your contact data and do you want yet another app competing with all the other things that made this mess in the first place personally I'd rather try we had the root of the problem and understand my phone a little bit better in the process so there you go that's contact cleanup 101 for Android users more how tools like these head over to how to see Netcom I'm Donald Bell thanks for watching