This is question that I have seen asked time and time again. Infact it was again asked of me on Mahalo.com which Im a member of; so I decided to do some research.

Q. Outlook and Google Contacts: I have about 1000 contacts between these two products. About 500 of them are duplicates.

 

A. I assume you want to clean this up so the contacts in outlook and google are the same? There is no free automated way to do this in Outlook 2003, Im not sure on 2007. The following article is a pretty good way to accomplish this:

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/2700/outlook_how_to_delete_duplicated_contacts/

There is an opensource project that is a free download but is still in beta. This program is designed to keep your Outlook and Gmail contacts synced. You can find this at:

http://www.webgear.co.nz/Products/GOContactSync.aspx

You may want to run this program first and then clean up Outlook. Then you can re-sync for a final matching.

I haven’t used this as I don’t use Outlook anymore, completely switched over to Gmail, but it looks like it will do the trick.

As I mentioned above I have made the switch to the cloud without looking back and have no problems.  The recent 90 min. outage of Gmail didnt effect me as I didnt find out about it till after the fact.  That and most of my email goes to my domain email addresses and then gets pulled by Gmail. (Its always nice to have a backup).  But if you are using Outlook and you are looking for a sync solution, this one looks pretty good.  Here is a clip from their site:

GO Contact Sync is an open source tool that synchronizes your contacts between Microsoft Outlook and Google Mail, it removes the hassle of entering details more than once. It supports contact categories and contact photos so your contacts will look exactly the same. There are a few sync options to suite your needs and it can all be done automatically, so it can be used as a backup tool.

Features

• Synchronizes your contacts between Microsoft Outlook and Google Mail.
• Supports contact categories and contact photos.
• Multiple sync options to suite your needs.
• Automatic sync.

Benefits

• Removes the hassle of entering your contacts more than once.
• Can be used as a backup tool.

Limitations

• When using GO Contact Sync with Microsoft Office 2003, Office will ask for permission to access your address book when synchronization begins.
• If two synchronized contacts have different photos, i.e the Google contact’s photo is different from the Outlook contact’s photo, their photos will not be synchronized.

Downloads

Download GO Contact Sync v1.0.0.3 Beta (hosted on SourceForge).

Closing Note: This app was written for Outlook 2003, I dont know if it works or is even needed on Outlook 2007.