I’ve had a lot of problems with importing and exporting contacts. I’d like to pick the collective brains of my fellow gnomies on this issue. Specifically, I have problems with importing to Google, my Palm Lifedrive and Thunderbird contacts. I use Thunderbird for work mail and Google for my personal mail. I’ve been trying to import my Outlook contacts on and off for about a year now. I’ve tried comma separated and tab separated. Still no luck. I’ve been too patient waiting for the programmer’s to release a solution. I did have limited success when I imported my Outlook contacts into my PDA. There were some adjustments, but nothing too daunting.

I read the Google help section on importing. They recommend that you create a spreadsheet in the format you want the contacts to be and import that. My contact list is a long one and I really don’t want to retype the whole thing.

Ultimately, I’d like my contact base to be the one in my PDA. I rely on that one heavily. I want to right click the PDA contact and have it launch Google mail composition. Or better yet, to give me a choice between Google or Thunderbird. Right now, Thunderbird is the default.

I’m not naive enough to think that I’ll get the perfect solution, especially since I want to import to so many different programs. But, am I unusual here? Don’t most tech savy people nowadays have multiple programs that can manage contacts? Wouldn’t it be nice if someone would come up with a seamless solution to handle them all? Maybe this is just a pipe dream. I’d like feedback anyway, especially if you’ve conquered this issue.

[tags]Google, contact lists, PalmOne, Thunderbird, Outlook[/tags]