Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I’m raring to answer some questions on this episode of Ask DottoTech.
We have had so many questions posted on our various social channels over the last little
while so let’s jump right into them.
We’re going to start with my friend Thorne who is apparently frustrated.
Thorne is saying his contact lists are a real frustration.
He’s using a Samsung Note 4 tablet to maintain a contact list.
Frustration #1: some names have as many as ten entries.
Most are duplicates.
Some come from Google+.
How do I get rid of the duplicates and prevent them from returning?
Good question, Thorne.
And his second question is how do I create automatic sync from my Google contacts to
Outlook?
Both awesome questions, Thorne.
I’m going to start out by jumping over into Gmail or any Google app so that we can get
to Google Contacts.
Now from within your Gmail screen, if you click on the dropdown menu to go to Contacts
here but you can also always go into your Google Contacts from the Google app screen,
which a lot of us don’t know about.
This is kind of an umbrella that clusters all of your different Google apps together
and boy oh boy, are there ever a lot of free apps Google gives us.
I think sometimes we forget how many free apps Google provides because Google doesn’t
really market those free apps because they don’t make any money on them.
But as we scroll through here, we can see there are so many apps available to us.
We can access the Contacts from here as well.
Now when we click on the Contacts, something interesting happens.
There’s a new version of contacts that’s going to display on your screen if you haven’t
looked at Google contacts for a little while.
Now I have to apologize.
I’ve got to blur the whole center of my screen because this is my real account and
I don’t want you bugging all of the people who are my friends.
This view that we have here is something that Google calls Contacts Preview.
If you don’t like this preview mode of contacts, you can always choose to go back by clicking
here and saying Leave contacts preview, which will put you back to the list view of contacts.
Now what does Contacts Preview give you?
Well, Google takes advantage of kind of all that they’re learning about your habits
and they cluster your contacts into different ways other than just an alphabetical listing.
They give you the ability to be able to sort your contacts based on who you contact the
most, which is a fairly logical way of doing things, based on the lists that you’ve created
in the past mail list but it will also cluster your contacts based on the different circles
that you’ve created in the social media tool Google+.
So depending on how you sorted your friends and family into circles in Google+, it will
also be reflected here in Contacts.
Now to get back to Thorne’s core question, which is how do I get rid of duplicates?
Could not be easier.
You can, if you’ve got a lot of duplicates, right here at the top, for example for me,
it’s asking me if I want to find all of my duplicates because I’ve got a few it
notices, or you could also go into the Tools here if you go just above the More menu, you
find Find duplicates, both of which will bring up all of your different duplicate accounts.
Now one thing that you probably want to do with your duplicates is you want to make sure
you’re not getting rid of or losing information.
So you go through it and by clicking on the Merge button, it will take and it will merge
all of the information that’s different between the two contacts that you have and
merge them into a single contact, thereby removing all of those duplicates and giving
you nice, rich, full-featured contacts for all of your individuals.
So you have to do that for all of your contacts, Thorne.
Now as far as not allowing them to happen again, that comes down to a sync issue between
your devices or your different applications that are using contacts and Google.
So I can’t promise you that you’ll never have duplicate contacts again.
We often have duplicates say in our calendar as well, especially when you start using multiple
services.
Now you mentioned that you use Outlook as well.
That’s probably where duplicates might be generated if you have it synced to a different
Outlook account.
Quite often the way that Outlook saves information back and forth means that’s just accidentally,
records get modified ever so slightly in the saving process so either Outlook or Google
Contacts or Google Calendar sees a file that is the same as different because there’s
just a slightly different thing in how they’re saved or how they’re archived.
So that can still happen.
Having said that, I’m going to put a link in the description below to this document
which is the Google App fixes which say, “Can I use Outlook with my Google App’s email?”
Yes, you can.
They talk you through the process in both Windows and Mac.
Once you’ve set that up, you should be fine.
The same concept should be working fine on your tablet, I imagine.
I haven’t set it up on the tablet or on the Note 4 but I imagine that you should be
fine setting it up the same sort of way as we have listed right here.
So Thorne, thank you so much for that question.
We’re going to stay in Google apps and this question came to us in Twitter from Pilates4u2.
“DottoTech, how do I multi-delete in Google photos?”
Good question.
I’m going to show you.
Again, going to that Google dropdown menu, I’m going to go into my Photos.
I’ve been on a bit of a photo binge lately, taking multiple photos, many of which should
be deleted because many of which are almost the exact same in nature.
For instance, I was taking lots of pictures Shannon with these pictures of Mussel Mania,
which by the way we’re going to send to her daughter who loves mussels to tease her
that we were having mussels and she wasn’t with us.
Kind of cruel, you might agree.
But you see here, as I hover my cursor over top of any one of the photos, that little
checkbox appears and that allows me to multi-select those photos.
If I want to do anything with them such as share them, archive them or indeed delete
them, I can do that at that moment.
It also asks, should I be moving to Trash for everything?
Yes indeed, remove it.
Next up we have a question from Brian Euerby and this is a little bit of a difficult one
for me to understand, just the way that he wrote it.
He says, “Emailing photos, tablets or smartphones, when you click Share, it gives you the option
to Gmail.
On website, you only have Google+, Facebook or Twitter.
Any way you can share options for website usage on PC?”
I’m kind of reading between the lines here but let’s go back into our Google Photos
and take a look at what I think he’s talking about.
If I want to take this photo here and share it, if I click on the Share tool which is
this kind of sideways triangle here, indeed you can share it immediately on Google+, Facebook
and Twitter built-in.
But this is the magic link right here.
If you create this share link and you copy that share link, you can then take that photo
and you can share it in any other tool.
So if we go and we compose a brand new email, we can then paste in that link and whoever
goes to that link will gain access to the photo.
So it creates a shared photo for us to share.
I hope that that answers your question, Brian Euerby.
All right, let’s move along.
From jujusimone, “Steve, I’ve exhausted the internet trying to find out how I can
put my Google calendar on desktop as opposed to a web view.
Thank you.”
I think what jujusimone is asking me here is, is there a way to import the Google Calendar
into a standard desktop calendar?
Indeed, there is.
Now depending on what operating system or what calendar you want to use, there’s going
to be a variety of different ways to do that but I have not, for example, set up the Apple
calendar on this particular computer.
So if I start typing in Calendar, let’s go to the calendar app and open it up, it
should be pretty much empty because it’s just the calendar app as it’s shipped from
Apple.
It’s got basically dates on it of kind of holidays.
What you have to do in any calendar app is you have to go in and you have to go into
the Accounts setting and there within the Accounts, you can choose to set up a Google
calendar.
You can enter your authorization for your Google ID and your Google account which will
then create a link or a sync between your Google calendar and your Google account and
this calendar and account.
It’s a process that you go through once.
Do it, save it and it should work.
Now it will, as we were talking about a little bit earlier, occasionally insert duplicates
just because of the way Google versus whatever native calendar you’re using or desktop
calendar you’re using, the way they save information.
But this should work for you.
You can see how to do it here on iOS and I showed you a little bit earlier the links
to do it from Outlook, which is a very similar process for everything happening in the Windows
world.
So indeed, you can create a link to a desktop version of the calendar.
There is no pure desktop version of the Google calendar to use.
You have to use a different calendar but you can sync it to the same data.
With that, I think we’ve spent enough time today on Ask DottoTech.
If you have any questions for us, for Ask DottoTech, please post them here in the YouTube
comments.
I read each and every comment and as often as possible, I will reply and answer your
questions.
I hope that you found today’s video to be useful.
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Until next time, I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!