Let's get so much more out of Google Contacts. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity.
Helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. If you use Gmail or any type of Google application, chances are you are using the Contacts page.
In today's video, I'm going to share with you five tips to get so much more out of Google Contacts. Let's get started with accessing the Google Contacts site.
For most of us, we spend much of our day here within Gmail. Ever since Gmail updated its interface, probably the most common question I've received is, Scott, where are the contacts?
In the previous version of Gmail, we had either a button or a drop-down menu on the left-hand side which took us directly to Google Contacts. I was really hoping with this new sidebar on the right-hand side that we would have a mini version of Google Contacts.
They've already given us the Calendar, Keep, and Tasks. It'll be interesting if they actually add a Contacts preview here on the right-hand side.
Until that happens, what you need to do is go up here to your Google apps icon, select it, and then find the Contacts icon. The very first tip today is to get you there even quicker with a keyboard shortcut.
Before I show you the shortcut, we need to make sure that you have Gmail shortcuts enabled. To do that, we want to click on Settings, go down to the Settings option.
On the very first tab, the general tab, scroll about halfway down, and you will see that there are keyboard shortcuts. By default, Gmail has this turned off, so you're gonna need to select keyboard shortcuts on, select this radio button, and then don't forget to scroll down to the bottom and select Save Changes.
Now, with keyboard shortcuts on, all you have to do is select the keys G and C, short for Google Contacts. I'm going to hit G C on my keyboard, and immediately in a new tab, it's going to pop up my Google Contacts.
It might take just a second there to load. I've got quite a few contacts in this sample batch here.
Any time that you are in Gmail, not even just the home screen, you could be within a message. As long as you're not in the search bar,
as long as you're not actually typing something, even if I just open up one of my emails, I could select G C on my keyboard, and it's going to bring me directly to my Contacts screen. The second tip I want to share with you as it pertains to Contacts also relates to Gmail.
Many of the contacts that we see here originated from email communication that we had with these individuals. What Gmail will do by default is add a new contact for every single person that you email or reply to.
However, there may be some of you who don't want everyone to be added to your contact list just because you emailed them or you reply to one of their emails. So let's go back to Gmail for just a second, we're gonna click that gear icon and select Settings once again, and we're staying within the General tab.
Scroll down a little bit further this time, and here is the option that says create contacts for auto-complete. You can see by default, when I send a message to a new person, it adds them to Other Contacts so that I can auto-complete to them next time.
Auto-complete to them next time. This is the default option.
If you like, you can turn this off so that you will manually add contacts yourself. Personally, I like the default option because it helps me to grow my contacts list.
Then I don't have to remember everyone's email addresses or their first name, last name. It's going to remember that information for me.
But if you don't want Google to continually add to your contacts list, you can choose this option here. All right, let's jump back into our contacts list.
Another problem that we often face no matter where you are managing your contacts is duplicates, right? You send someone, the same person maybe has multiple email addresses, and Google maybe creates three different accounts, three different records for the same individual.
Google makes it very easy for us to find those duplicates. Here in the menu, we can select the Duplicates option, and it's going to quickly take a look at all of the duplicate entries.
In this case, it's found two duplicates within my contacts list. You have an opportunity to take a look and see if they are actually duplicates.
Maybe you actually know people with the same name, or maybe you accidentally entered in the same email address for two different people. You can look at some of the data that is duplicated, whether it's a first name and last name.
Sometimes you may have duplicate email addresses. Before I dismiss or merge those accounts, I can always click on them myself and take a closer look at what is going on within this particular account.
What I can do immediately is I can say, you know what, this is the same person, I would like to merge this information and select Merge in the lower right-hand corner. The great thing is that regardless if there are multiple email addresses and multiple phone numbers, like you see here, Google will merge them all.
It will keep both of these phone numbers, it will keep both of these email addresses. Now if you don't want to keep both of them, you can either remove one of them after you've merged them or you could do that right now.
You could select this, hit the edit contact icon, remove the phone number or the email address, for example, that you don't want before merging. I'm just gonna hit the Merge button right now, and there we go.
There you see, I've got both email addresses and the phone number, and I'm gonna do the same here for the one at the bottom. You will notice in the top right-hand corner, if you have a large list of duplicates and you've done a quick review of them all, you can always select Merge All.
It's going to do everything on your behalf. Selecting Duplicates once in a while, maybe once a month or every couple of months, might be a smart idea so that you don't have too many duplicates within your system.
All right, let's go back to my master list or the default view here. A tip that I want to share with you has to do with adding some more visuals to your contacts, specifically adding some pictures.
Here you can see in my sample list I have almost no pictures beside my contacts. By default, what Google is going to do is put the letter of their first name along with sort of a random color beside it.
Here you can see I've got an awful lot of C's with just a few different colors here, a few different shades of purple and maroon or magenta, whatever that is here. It doesn't really help me to differentiate who these people are.
I might like to have some pictures for people that I actually know well. Some of these pictures may come over pre-populated if that person has it associated with a Google+ account, if they've already uploaded a picture on their end.
Some of these pictures may be pre-populated from their own user account. For others that you would like to add their picture, one of the main reasons that I like to add pictures is that this carries over to my mobile device.
When I'm texting with someone or if I'm looking up someone's name to give them a call on my smartphone, I like having the picture there rather than just the text. Let me show you how to do that.
I'm going to select this person right here, just as an example. If you click on the actual icon on the avatar area, you can see that it gives us the option to set a contact photo.
We've got a choice here, this is a recent photo I believe that I've uploaded, it's of myself, but that's not obviously who I want to put in here. My second choice is to upload a photo.
Some of you are probably thinking, well, you probably don't just have their headshots on your system, right. You don't just have them ready to go to upload your photo.
Here's a much easier way for you to do so. I recommend going to one of their social media accounts.
In this example, I am going to use my own account just because I haven't asked anyone else's permission to share their photo in today's video. But you can go to Twitter, you can go to LinkedIn, to Facebook, anywhere where someone typically includes their headshot.
Here in Twitter, all I'm gonna do is select the headshot, which is going to give me a larger preview. If I right-click on this image, I've got a few different options here, and what I want to select is copy image address.
Not this one, not copy the image, but I want to copy the image address. I'm gonna select that, which is going to copy the image address to the clipboard.
I'm going to come back to my contacts, and I'm going to select upload photo. You're going to be presented with a screen or a dialog like this, which typically allows you to select or pick that photo.
Even though I have that same photo here waiting for me, what I'm going to do is I'm going to paste what we just copied on the clipboard. This is that copy image address, and I'm gonna hit Return.
What it's going to do is it's going to actually download that photo to my computer, but it's also immediately going to upload it right here to my contacts list. I can change the dimensions here if I drag it within the corners.
I can rotate it if I like, but I like the way it looks already, so I'm going to hit Done. Now this image is added to this contact.
If I close this up, there you can see, now I have this image added to this person's contact here. For those key contacts, maybe they could be members of your team, your family, or key clients, find their social media account.
If you would like to add their
face alongside their contact, you can just copy the image address and then paste it to get it into your contacts list. All right, the final tip I want to share with you today is all about creating groups.
One of the easiest ways to be more efficient within Gmail is to create groups, so that you don't have to be adding multiple email addresses all of the time. If there's a group of three or five or maybe even 20 people that you email on a regular basis, it's much better to create a group.
Within Google Contacts, they actually refer to these as Labels. Of course, individual contacts can belong to more than just one label.
Here I've got one called Client Team where I have four individuals. When I click on it, I can see those four individuals right here.
I've got another label that's called ABC Work Project, but I don't actually have anyone in this work project just yet. Let me show you a few ways in how you can add people to a Label.
If I go back to my main contacts list, one method of doing so is actually just by checking the few contacts that I want to add. Maybe these are three individuals that I would like to add to this label.
With the three of these selected, all I need to do is select the manage labels here in the right-hand corner of the screen, and I'm going to say ABC Work Project. That is going to immediately add those individuals.
You can see the number three. It's going to add those individuals to this particular label.
Maybe there's someone else that I want to add to that label, and I don't want to go down my long list of people. All I need to do is find them.
I can use the search window here to find them. Then if I select the more actions option, I can see the labels at the bottom of this menu.
Here I can say ABC Work Project, and I've got the checkmarks there. You can see that it's highlighted, or I've got the label attached directly to this contact.
You can also see here on the left-hand side, now it has been increased from three to four. The great thing is, when I go back to Gmail, let me go back to my inbox, and I'm going to start to compose a brand new message.
If I start typing the words ABC, now I get ABC Work Project here, and it actually gives me a preview of some of the email addresses in there. I can select that, and immediately I've got all four of those contacts.
All the individuals who make up that particular label. I hope that you enjoyed those five tips for getting more out of Google Contacts.
I'd like to hear from you next. What are some of your favorite tips or tricks on getting the most out of Google Contacts?
Of the five that I shared today, which one is most helpful to you? Thank you so much for watching.
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