- Our topic de jure is Google Contacts.
Can you use Google Contacts as your central contact manager?
And what the heck is going on with it?
Because if we're gonna be perfectly honest,
it's kind of a confusing tool.
So we'll explore it today on Dotto Tech.
(soft music)
Steve Dotto here, how the heck you're doing this fine day?
At Dotto Tech we make technology easy so you can do more.
And making it easy is our main goal today
because we're gonna be dealing with what I think
is one of the simplest tools on the planet,
our contact manager,
where we store our personal emails
and email addresses and phone numbers
and mailing addresses of our contacts.
We're gonna be looking at Google Contacts.
And it should be a really simple thing,
but for some reason it's not simple.
Google, the way that they give us access to Google Contacts
gets confusing and people tend to lose track of it.
And also making it work,
making having one central contact database
when we have multiple devices,
when our smartphone tries to create a new address book
and our email system tries to create another address book,
so making sure that we have a strategy in place
so that we have one central contact database
that all of the others look to so that when we go to look up
somebody's address on our phone,
it's there even if we've input it on our computer.
So that's gonna be our goal today
is to make sense of Google Contacts.
But before we begin, a quick message
from our sponsor who today is me,
actually our weekly webinar series.
Every week here at Dotto Tech
we do a free tutorial webinar called Webinar Wednesday
where we teach you some aspect of technology.
And I wanted to make sure that you were aware
that we do this almost every single week,
and if you wanna up your productivity skills,
up your social marketing skills,
up your online video skills,
perhaps you should take a look
at what we deliver each week on Webinar Wednesday.
So I'll put a link in.
You can take a look and see what this week's topic is,
and I hope to see you online on Wednesday.
Now let's get into Google Contacts.
And really kinda what spawned this entire video today
was Google's recent update of their Gmail platform
which has some good aspects and has some bad aspects,
but by far the worst aspect of it
is how they dealt with Google Contacts in it.
Oh my gosh, they really put their foot in it this time.
Let me show you.
This before you is the classic version of Gmail
before we got the recent update to Gmail
which we've done a video on
if you wanna take a look at the new features
and the new interface.
But this is what we've looked at for years and years
as far as managing our email.
Now when we wanted to go in and see our contact list,
when we wanted to see our address book,
we used to just go under here,
under this little dropdown menu here and choose Contacts,
but they moved it.
See, watch what happens when I choose Contacts here now,
it pops up a little menu here saying
Your Contacts are now here.
Contacts and many other Google apps
can be found under this menu.
This is the Google app menu
which they want us to use for all things Google now.
And in here now is our contact database.
So here is our address book available to us now
under this Google apps menu.
So that is the first point of confusion
I think with Google Contacts is for so long
we were used to looking at them in one location
and now they've moved them to underneath
this Google apps menu.
You can of course add new addresses
by clicking here in the plus button in the bottom
which will allow you to manually enter
new email addresses and new phone numbers
and new physical addresses and new contact information
should you need to,
but typically speaking most people don't wanna
enter addresses at when they,
when you wanna enter an address
is when you're in communication with somebody.
So if we go back into our email client,
and let's say I was in a conversation with Sheeba
and I wanted to add Sheeba's email address
to my address book,
all you do is you hover your cursor
over top of the person's name in your reply window
as you're reading the email,
and there you get the choice
to add the person's name to contacts.
This is the easiest way to add
somebody's email address to your contacts.
But I think this automation
causes a little bit of confusion.
Now the confusion comes from the fact
that when you are in your email
and you start typing in a person's email address,
often their email address will come up
even if you haven't added them to your contacts.
Now the beauty of adding somebody
to your contacts of course is
when you go to address a new email
and you start typing their name into the address field,
it autofills for you so that you can automatically
send an email to that person
without having to look up their address.
That's all great and it's technology
that we've used for a long time.
But I think we get a little bit confused with contacts
what we've added to our address book and not
because often as you're typing in a person's name,
their email address will appear
even if you haven't added them to contacts,
that's because Gmail basically uses
almost I guess it's sorta like cookies.
I'm not positive that that's exact technology,
but the fact that they are in your,
the fact that you sent and received email through them
means that they've stored that information
and you can access it even if you haven't
imported it into your address book.
I hope that makes sense.
So if you want to make sure
that somebody is in your address book
which means then that they will be available
on all of your synced devices,
on all of the other devices
that you use your account with,
then you wanna make sure
that you hover your cursor over the top
and you add them to your email address
just like I've shown you here,
and you add them to, sorry, add them to your contacts
just like I've shown you here.
Before we go on,
I wanna show you two different quick ways
to get to your Contacts
if you don't like the idea
of having to go through this menu
in order to get to your Contacts
which most people frankly don't like the idea.
The first is a really simple kind of productivity hack.
Just go into your Contacts,
just go into your Contact file once,
and then here in the browser window,
grab, in the browser, the address,
all you do is you click in the address bar there
and you drag it down,
and you can drop it right here into your address bar,
and then you can quickly get to your Contacts
just by clicking up in here.
It's very similar to the way that we used to go under that
Gmail menu in order to get to your Contacts,
and they're always available to you.
That's the way that I really like to do it.
Or here's another way.
I'm gonna go back to my Inbox,
and actually I'm going into my own real email now
so you can see that there's lots and lots
more email messages,
and all you do is hit G + C,
and it launches Google Contacts.
Now again this is now my entire contact list,
and you can see I'm gonna have to blur a lot
'cause there's a lot of personal information here.
But you can see how quickly you can get to that.
Now in order to use that keyboard shortcut,
G + C, just tap tap,
you have to be in the basic inbox,
you can't be in any editing field.
So you can't already have opened an email
and have the address book open
or have the address bar open
or be in the text entry
because then it's gonna look at the fact
that you're entering text.
It only works when you are in your Inbox
in order to jump into your Contacts that way.
But it's a pretty cool hack I think.
All right before I take you into the smartphone
to talk about syncing this to your other devices,
syncing your contact list to your other devices,
just a few kind of top-level things
about using Google Contacts.
Now the first thing is
it will go through all of your contacts
and look for duplicates which is a huge benefit.
And here it's found two different duplicates.
I can view them, make sure they're the same person,
and I can merge their addresses together
so that we don't have multiple contacts
for different individuals.
And what it does is it basically adds,
typically speaking you'll have one connection
with somebody from one email address
and then maybe another from another email address
'cause often we have a personal and business email address,
this allows us to combine those two into the same record
and then to mark the email addresses
as personal and business.
That sort of stuff as you're going along.
So it's got some nice intelligence to help you out there.
The other big feature about using Google Contacts
is the ability to add labels.
When you create labels,
then you can make lists
so that you can quickly email an entire subset
of your overall database quickly and easily.
And this is the idea,
for example I did it for my wedding,
for my wedding to make sure that all of my family
that was involved in the wedding was,
rather than address each one individually
and then possibly miss somebody,
I could just add them all to the wedding list
and then I can email them all at once,
all of my kids all at once.
Now when you go into any one individual,
you also have some additional capabilities
as far as sorting and organizing people.
'Cause if you got a large list of contacts,
you wanna be able to organize them
and be able to make sure that the people you wanna find
you can find when you need to find them,
and usually search is gonna do that,
but you can also add a star to people
which will move them to the top of the list.
This is where you go in this menu
when you actually open the individual contact,
this is where you go and you can add them
to any of the labels that you've created
to make sure they're on the correct mail list.
So it's really easy to manage each one of your contacts
and make sure they're on the appropriate mail list
so that you can communicate with them
when and where you need to.
Now let's take a look at the same issues
that we face but on the smartphone.
Now on your phone if you are on a Android phone,
it's pretty easy to merge Google Contacts
into your Android phone because Google is Android.
So I'm gonna walk through the process
of making sure that your contacts are available to you
on the iPhone in our demo today.
Because here's the issue,
when you buy any new phone,
and this also goes for some Android phones,
like if you buy a Samsung phone,
they want you to use their contact list often,
and so people get confused
that they've saved an email address
or a phone number on their phone,
but then they don't have access to it on their computer.
And that causes a lot of issues I think.
So on your phone you have to make sure
that you go into your Account Settings.
So go into your Settings area.
In your Settings area
you go into your Accounts and Passwords right there,
and you make sure that you have first of all
enabled your Google account on your iPhone,
and this will also give you access
to your email and other aspects,
but you do that just by clicking on Add Account
then choosing a Google account right there
and then entering your credentials
to be able to sign in using the Google account.
So that's step one of making Google Contacts
your universal contact manager
so when you save a phone number
or save an address on your phone,
then it saves to your Google Contacts.
The other place that you go
is right beneath that Contacts,
Accounts and Passwords,
is the Contacts menu,
and there you've got to go in
and you've got to choose your default account
to be your Gmail account.
You go in there and you choose that default account,
and don't use your iPhone and don't use your iCloud account,
but use your Gmail account at that point there,
and then when you save an address on your phone,
it will be saved to your Contacts.
Also when you try and look up an address,
it's gonna look it up
from your Google Contacts file as well.
That's the key to making Google Contacts
ubiquitous through your entire toolkit.
Now personally I think it should be a lot easier
to manage your contacts than Google and Apple and Samsung
and all those other manufacturers make it,
but alas it's not.
You have to go through these steps
and understand the process
in order to really take advantage of Contacts
and really be more productive and efficient.
So I hope our video today helps get you on the right path.
Now if you have found today's video useful,
I do have a couple of favors to ask.
First is comment.
Let me know what you think about Google Contacts.
If you've got a better solution for Contacts,
I'd love to know what you're doing with your Contacts
and how you're managing them on your system.
Secondly, if you found today's video
to be entertaining, useful or enlightening,
then share it with others
and make sure that you have subscribed
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as we release them.
Till next time, I'm Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.