The Deduplicator feature in 6.0 is a nice first try, but it needs some improvements or perhaps documentation. I used it only on contacts. I had numerous contacts that appeared to me to be duplicates, but that weren’t identified as duplicates. The system also identified anything with a blank name as a duplicate of everything else with a blank name. This is probably not a good idea. It’s not clear exactly what field is being compared as duplicates—Full Name, Display As, First and Last Name, something else? I couldn’t find any documentation. Perhaps this would have been clear from a description. Also doesn’t seem to be sophisticated in identifying contacts with the same phone number or email to see if they are intentionally or accidentally duplicated. It might also be handy to allow a Merge command on the Right Click menu so that you could select two or more contacts and merge them. Although I have these suggestions, the feature was still very useful and helped me clean up my mixed up contacts after porting from Thunderbird.
Hi, de-duplicator uses only name for contacts, there is no logical way to use anything else.
So if you want to de-duplicate your contacts it will look only for same name. So far it works as intended and there is no reason to alter it.
Jan
Hi John, which name fields are used by the de-duplicator to determine if contact A is the same as contact B?
This is fine as far as it goes, and I might be satisfied if I hadn’t seen much better deduplicators. The program I used on iOS was Multi Edit (now renamed to Simpler). It is much smarter about recognizing similar contacts that may be duplicates. It looks for duplicate phone numbers and email addresses, and has more choices for merging. I also have some contacts filed by first name and some by last, and it would be nice to have help in making them consistent. My contacts were a real mess after importing from Thunderbird, and there’s still work to do to make them consistent.
Your deduplicator helped, but could have done more. I’m just suggesting that you keep an open mind about enhancing some future version.
Because deduplicator Tool is new, it might get improvements based on users suggestions, I am completing them and at one time I will report them to my superiors.
Jan
Checks only names - not email addresses?? - is that a joke??
OK - I re-imported and put the email addresses in the name column - then the deduplicator found the duplicates - great - but how now to rename the column to email ? - I can’t export in csv format - this is pretty ridiculous!
aha - you CAN export to csv - but it’s not under the “export” menu - huh?!
Hi, you can not rename a column, the name of the column is set, you can export to .csv from Agenda view or from Contacts, but only columns shown in that view will be exported into the .csv file.
Thank you for understanding,
Paul.
My experience was not good. Fortunately I selected to save duplicates to a folder rather than delete. It then removed all duplicates and the master copy leaving me with a half emply contact list