Archive for Plaxo
Remove Duplicate Outlook Contacts
Posted by: | CommentsI recently decided to sign up for Plaxo (still don’t know if that was a good idea). Plaxo is yet another social networking site that will take you away from doing real work 
. After signing up, you can then sync your Outlook address book with the on-line Plaxo address book to have ‘in the clouds’ access anywhere. So I chose to do this and then when I went back to my Outlook contacts, wa la, I had two of everybody in there. Great.
Of course, I googled my problem and after sifting through many results, I found the below which worked like a charm. Many thanks and please go to Tech Recipe for graphics and the step-by-step instructions. Instructions without graphics are below.
Another way to find and eliminate duplicates is to export your contacts into a .csv file, open them in excel and do a sort by name. I like this method when I know I have several contacts with the same name, but with different information in them. It’s a bit easier for me to consolidate all the entries into one while looking at them in excel. When you’re finished, simply import them back into Outlook.
Directions
1. Open your Outlook contacts
2. Click View, mouse over Current View and select Phone List. This will create a list of all of your contacts in a column based view.
3. Right-click a column header and select Field Chooser from the resulting menu.
4. In the Field Chooser box, use the dropdown and select All Contact fields.
5. Select Created.
6. Drag Created to the Column Headers to add it to the list. Close the Field Chooser box.
7. Now click on the newly added column header (Created). This will sort all of your items by the date that they were added to your Contacts.
8. Scroll down to the first contact in the list that is to be deleted and select it.
9. Scroll down to the last contact that is to be deleted. Hold down the Shift key and select this contact. This will highlight all of the contacts that you are going to remove.
10. Press the Delete key. The duplicate contacts will be removed.
11. Click View, mouse over Current View and select the view you normally use for your contacts (such as Business Cards).
12. Your Contacts should not display any duplicates.
Calendar Collaboration
Posted by: | CommentsCollaboration with clients is a high priority with VAs. There are a bevy of tools out there that we all talk about and try, some of them actually work for us! How do YOU evaluate a collaboration tool and decide to use it?
I like to look at what those in my AssistU community say about them by posting some queries in our forum. This eliminates some and puts others in the forefront to be investigated further.
I’ve done several posts regarding Google calendar’s 2-way calendar sync and Plaxo with its many features. This week, I’ve also looked into SyncMyCal, OggSync, ShareO and gSyncIt.
Although this may not be my last posting on this subject (there are always new tools coming out), here’s a synopsis of the pros and cons as I’ve experienced them. For the purposes of this posting, I evaluated these apps for two criteria: ability to update/add to/change calendar appointments and the same for contacts.
Plaxo
This is my hands-down winner. What it does:
- ability to add or remove appointments via a web log-in and they will show up in my client’s Outlook calendar. Note: the client has to have Plaxo for Windows installed for this to work (of course).
- same for contacts. I update/add/delete a contact and it will sync with Outlook. Tasks will also sync, but I haven’t figured out how to put them in categories as you can in Outlook.
- A big plus with Plaxo is that it offers ‘sync points’. That is, if you or your client has a Yahoo, Google or other mail account, Plaxo offers these sync points you can set up where your calendar and contact information can be synced with Plaxo. The thing that we need to remember is that it is only a 1-way sync. That is it will read changes only from Google to Plaxo. In addition, it only recognizes and updates if you add or delete a contact. If you open an existing contact in Google or Plaxo and change a phone number, it will not be changed in the other application.
- If you have others in your address book who also use Plaxo, you will automatically get updated contact information on them whenever they update their own contact information. Nice.
Plaxo also has the increasingly popular Pulse feature – another social networking tool to use. There are many other features that remind me of Facebook.
Google Calendar
Since Google implemented their great 2-way calendar sync to use with Outlook, I can heartily recommend using this if you only need calendar syncing with Outlook (not contacts). What it does:
- Download the small program from Google and spend a few minutes getting the tool set up in your Outlook and you’re ready to go! Configure it to sync at intervals set by you and you can see the little icon working in your Outlook.
- It will sync only your primary Google calendar
- If you use Google calendar with Plaxo, you can add more than one calendar as a sync point (another plus for Plaxo)
- Contacts are not synced AT ALL. This means if you add a contact to your Google contacts, it will never appear in your Outlook contacts. You can do an initial export from Outlook and import your contacts into Google.
- Now, as you’ve already read above, if you use Google with Plaxo, you will have the 1-way syncing.
These next few I have never tried, so I really can’t review them, I’ll just give a little information based on my research.
ShareO
Check out their website. They say calendars, contacts, tasks and the inbox can all be shared. This is not a free program. This program got very poor reviews on the AssistU forums, so I’m staying away from it.
Oggsync
This is a program that syncs your calendar between Google and Outlook. It will also sync them with your mobile device. It will sync multiple Google calendars (which Google doesn’t do). There is a free and a pro version. It looked harder to set up—you have to go deep into your Outlook settings to get it set up. I really don’t need the mobile syncing part, so I just wasn’t interested in this one.
gSyncIt – updated on 7-26-2010 after receiving a comment from Dave at gSyncIt
I am the author of gSyncit and find that the Lynn’s take on my product is unjustified. She fails to draw her own conclusion of my product and opts to take the viewpoint of a _single_ user experience failing to take into consideration that the user perhaps didn’t configure the product correctly!
I encourage any user looking for a powerful and inexpensive sync solution to check out gSyncit. For $15 you can sync calendars, contacts, notes, and tasks with Google and ultimately with most mobile devices.
Dave, I’m glad you took time to write about your product. I’ve spent a little time re-looking at your website http://www.daveswebsite.com and see you’ve had quite a few software upgrades since I wrote about it nearly 2 years ago.
Doing several searches, I only found good things being said about your software – 2 reviews are below as well as I see you have links to reviews right on your home page.
http://www.thehypervisor.com/2009/09/review-gsyncit/
http://jeremywaldrop.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/synchronizing-blackberry-outlook-and-gmail-without-a-bes-server/
I’m glad your software is becoming more popular and I’m happy to post this update in my original column as well as here in the comment section.
Lynn Dye
This program looks very new and it says it syncs multiple Google calendars with Outlook AND it syncs the contacts as well. When something is that new and from a source I don’t know, I’m reticent to use it. One reviewer wrote in saying after he installed it, he lost everything on his calendar and instead got someone else’s appointments put in his calendar instead – sheesh!
SyncMyCal
Here is another program that will sync your Google to your Outlook calendar. There is a free lite version and a paid version. With the paid version, you will get 2-way contact syncing. SyncMyCal has been around for awhile and seems to have pretty good reviews.
To summarize – it seems to me that these last three programs really aren’t necessary with the advent of Google’s 2-way calendar sync unless you have multiple Google calendars you need to sync, or you need to keep your contacts synced between Outlook and Google.
Plaxo will sync calendars, contacts and tasks – all for free. There are premium features you can check out though.
For myself, using Plaxo in conjunction with Google calendar works pretty well for me. I realize there are other possibilities out there as well – feel free to share.
Calendar Sync Tool – Plaxo
Posted by: | CommentsA few weeks ago, I talked about using Google as a 2-way calendar/tasks/contacts/notes sync tool to access either your own or your client’s calendar without having to login to a desktop client or a remote computer.
I started using Plaxo with a client over a year ago. It was how I originally accessed and made changes to her calendar, contacts and tasks. It was a simple login from my web browser and my entries were synced to her Outlook. If you do use Plaxo with a client, either they will need to do the download and install to their email client, or you will need to log in and do it for them. After the install, the software leads you through choices about syncing. For example, you can choose to sync only the calendar and not contacts, etc. There will be Plaxo icons appearing in Outlook after installation.
You’re not limited to using Plaxo with just Outlook. Plaxo gives you the option to add “sync points” with Yahoo, Google, MSN, Windows Mail, Mobile and Outlook Express. It must be noted that these are all 1-way syncs. So this means if you are entering calendar updates, contacts or new tasks in, you’ll need to enter them in Yahoo, Google, etc. Then, they will sync to Plaxo. See below for an excerpt from the Plaxo Help Site that explains how it handles Google:
Google Synchronization Limits
Currently, the Google sync point is a one-way sync. It can only read data and changes to the data from Google to Plaxo. Any changes on the Plaxo side will not reflect back to your Google address book.
In addition, we only support contact deletions and additions during the sync. Changes to existing contact records will not sync to your Plaxo account.
It also must be pointed out that the web mail apps mentioned above are the 1-way sync. Since Plaxo has a software download for Outlook, that is a 2-way sync. This means when you enter a new appointment from within Plaxo, it will sync with the linked Outlook account.
When setting up your sync points with your various web accounts, Plaxo does give you options on what to sync. For example, you can choose to only sync your calendar and nothing else. If you change your mind and decide to remove a sync point, there are no worries about deleting any information. It simply stops the sync.
If one of your Plaxo contacts updates their contact information, it silently communicates this to your Plaxo account and updates it – nice.
There is a Plaxo Premium service that offers some benefits. A new service added is the ability to sync (again only 1-way) from your LinkedIn contacts to Plaxo.
There are many other features and benefits from Plaxo, such as ability to see and send your picture with each email, see pictures of your contacts (if they’ve uploaded one), get reminders of people’s birthdays and many more.
Plaxo also has a popular Pulse feature. This is Plaxo’s social networking side of things. You see your contact’s updates, blog postings, comments, etc. This can be delivered to your in-box, or you can view updates from the web.
Earlier this year Plaxo was acquired by Comcast. This gives me reason for pause, although they initially said privacy policies would not be changed, policies can be changed at any time. By choosing to be on-line and participating in a number of social networks, I have no expectation of being anonymous. Since Comcast is an information-collecting gorilla, digesting Plaxo just made it a bit bigger. To put that in perspective though, just mull over all the information Google has on all of us!
Remove Duplicate Outlook Contacts
Posted by: | CommentsI recently decided to sign up for Plaxo (still don’t know if that was a good idea). Plaxo is yet another social networking site that will take you away from doing real work . After signing up, you can then sync your Outlook address book with the on-line Plaxo address book to have ‘in-the-cloud’ access anywhere. So I chose to do this and then when I went back to my Outlook contacts, wa la, I had two of everybody in there. Great.
Of course, I googled my problem and after sifting through many results, I found the below which worked like a charm. Credit goes to Tech Recipes for this great tip. To summarize the tip, what you will do to eliminate the duplicates is to add a date column in your Outlook contacts and then you’ll sort by date to easily separate the duplicates.
1. Open your Outlook contacts
2. Click View, mouseover Current View and select Phone List. This will create a list of all of your contacts in a column based view.
3. Right-click a column header and select Field Chooser from the resulting menu.
4. In the Field Chooser box, use the dropdown and select All Contact fields.
5. Select Created.
6. Drag Created to the Column Headers to add it to the list. Close the Field Chooser box.
7. Now click on the newly added column header (Created). This will sort all of your items by the date that they were added to your Contacts.
8. Scroll down to the first contact in the list that is to be deleted and select it.
9. Scroll down to the last contact that is to be deleted. Hold down the Shift key and select this contact. This will highlight all of the contacts that you are going to remove.
10. Press the Delete key. The duplicate contacts will be removed.
11. Click View, mouseover Current View and select the view you normally use for your contacts (such as Business Cards).
12. Your Contacts should not display any duplicates.
This is a great solution for those times when you get a new device and something goes wrong with your contacts. Another way to fix the duplicate problem is to export all your contacts to a .csv file and open it in excel. Then, simply sort by name and delete the duplicates. I find this method helpful when I have several of the same contacts, but with different information. It’s easier to choose which one to keep when looking in excel (at least for me). Good luck!
Calendar, Address Book and Task Sharing Program
Posted by: | CommentsIt seems that VAs (virtual assistants) are always on the lookout for a great calendar program to use with their clients. Sometimes our clients are attached to Outlook and don’t want to move to a web-based tool such as Google or Airset. What to do?
I’ve been using, very successfully with a client, a free program called Plaxo. The client needs to be signed up for the service (you don’t have to). Plaxo has some great features that allows you to sync your calendar and contacts from Google, Yahoo, Apple and AOL. If you make a calendar change from within your Yahoo calendar, it will change and sync ALL your calendars without having to push any buttons or connect any cables!
Once your client has signed up, all you’ll need to do is get their login info and then login to their account. From there, you can see their calendar AND you are able to make changes, add appointments, anything you need to do. I downloaded Plaxo and was able to add my client’s calendar as an extra calendar into my Outlook. Next, take a look at contacts–you have the ability to maintain their contact database, add people, groups, etc. Same thing for tasks. You now have the ability to see, edit, or add tasks. Really, the only thing you can’t do is access their in-box.
You can have Plaxo check all your contacts for those in your address book already using Plaxo and get connected with them. This means if your contact changes any information, it’s automatically updated in your address book as well – nifty. http://www.plaxo.com
