Gmail Contacts Tips and Tricks

How to add, delete and organize Gmail contacts? What are the Tips and Tricks?

Gmail has a special feature of automatically adding the email addresses of the people whom you send emails frequently. Even if you send an email to anybody once, Gmail stores that email ID and when you type the email Id in the address box, it will suggest you, if you want to choose the contact that you have emailed already.

There are more people today who never save any contacts to their address book or contacts list.

If you save the email addresses, it will be very easy to organize the email addresses and this will help you save a lot of time when sending emails.

  • When you click on the Contacts button just below the Folders list, you will see a page like below
Gmail Contacts Button
Gmail Contacts Button
Gmail Contacts View
Gmail Contacts View
  • This is the page where you can manage your contacts
  • The below image explains the description about the buttons available in this page
Gmail Contacts Description
Gmail Contacts Description
  • The above image explains the first step of organizing your contacts
  • If you want to add a contact in Gmail, click the “add contact” button
  • You can create many groups for easy emailing by just clicking on the “add group” button
  • You can move contacts from 1 group to another
  • Suggested contacts are the email addresses saved automatically by Gmail and when you click the view suggestion, it will display the list of contact that can be added to the contacts list

How to add a contact?

  • When you click add contact button, you will get a page as below to enter the contact’s details
Gmail Add Contacts
Gmail Add Contacts
  • You can add the contact person’s Name, email, Phone, Address, Instant Messenger ID and more…
  • Gmail does not limit you to add one email ID per person, you can add more email IDs to 1 contact like home email ID, office email ID, etc…. and you can add more than 1 address, 1 phone number and 1 instant messenger Id to one contact.
  • If you want to organize your contacts into many groups, you can create groups of your preference
  • Click on the Add Group button
  • You will get a prompt as seen below
Gmail Add Contact Group
Gmail Add Contact Group
  • Enter the name of the group you want to create and click OK. You can edit the group name later
  • If you have never used the contact page, but if you have been sending emails to your friends then you will get a suggested list of email addresses that you have sent an email to
  • Click “Suggested Contacts” on the left to display the suggested email addresses
Gmail Suggested Contacts
Gmail Suggested Contacts
  • Choose the email addresses that you want to save and organize
  • Then click “Move to My Contacts”
  • You will see all the email Ids that you have selected have been moved to “My Contacts” and saved
  • If you want the email Id’s to be saved under specific group, click or select the email address in the 2nd column to get the page like below
Gmail Add Contacts to a group
Gmail Add Contacts to a Group
  • Select the group that you want to move your contacts or email addresses to
  • You can also edit any email address by simply clicking on the email address and on the right side column click on the edit button
  • You can also do a bulk import of all contacts from Outlook, Yahoo or Hotmail. You need to export the contacts from the email clients first.
  • Then choose the import button and add the contacts in Gmail
Gmail Import Export Contacts
Gmail Import Export Contacts

To delete any contacts or groups, click on the top right corner of the contacts page which says “Delete Contact” or “Delete Group”

These are the simplest method to manage any contacts in Gmail. This is very powerful than any other email service providers

If you have a question or suggestion, please post a comment

Dave 🙂

34 thoughts on “Gmail Contacts Tips and Tricks”

  1. Dave,
    How do you change the format of contacts in G-mail? Mine are first name,last name and I want to do last name, first name.

    Thanks
    KP

    1. when the whole list of contacts is up, click on (at top) more actions. There you may change the sort order between last and first name.

  2. You can do better things with Outlook with Gmail POP account.

    But no separate software for Gmail alone.

    Dave

  3. I recently exported my Outlook contacts to Google so I could sync them with my mobile phone (Palm Pixi). On the phone, entries such as “Continental Airlines” is sorted under the “A”, i.e., it’s treating “Airlines” as the last name of the contact. How can I enter the text in Google contacts to keep the two names together? I thought there would be a field for “first name” and “last name”, but there is only one box for “name”. I guess I could put an underscore between the two words. Do you know of any other tricks?

    Thanks,
    Jane

  4. Did you know that typing iPhone insurance UK into Google return over 18,000 results? You can find so numerous great companies out there that are under-cutting the higher street providers by up to 50%.

  5. LIke K.P. in earlier question, I cannot figure out how to change the format of my entire mailbox to last name abc order. When I exported them from another mail service, they all came in first name order even though the addresess from the former site were as I would like them ….last name, first name alphabetical listing. The thought of going through and retyping leaves me to find another mail service. Any suggestions on how to rearrange the order will be greatly appreciated.
    Thanks in advance,
    Barb

  6. I have a long list of contacts but now when I click on Contacts it just brings up an empty box with no names…. I know the info is still there but why doesn’t it show the list?

  7. Even though I know the list is there, it does not show when I click on Contacts on the left side of screen.. All I get is a blank screen

    1. click on groups and make sure my contacts is checked. you may be looking at an empty subgroup or all your contacts are in one of the sub groups.

  8. Hey, I just had the same question as Ken, I would like to organize my contacts by last name/first name, and I can figure that out how to enter my contacts that way, but when I look at the list of my contacts it is all jumbled because it is organized by first name and not last name. Is there anything I can do to change this? Thank you!
    Ben

  9. I accidentally put a group of people into a group folder by accident, how can a remove the whole group that I put into the folder at one time with out deleting them from the total contacts, need to go back through the names and select specific ones to put back into this group folder.

  10. How do I save my contacts into a separate folder which I can keep on my computer just in case I lose the contact emails?

  11. I exported my contacts from Palm Desktop using vCard, more accurate than using other format. All categories didn’t transfer however such as c

  12. I exported my contacts from Palm Desktop using vCard, more accurate than using other format. All categories didn’t transfer however such as custom fields even though gmail contacts allows for custom fields. Also when I exported from gmail to spreedsheet a lot of colums with headers showed up that are not visible or accesable while adding a new contact. Very confused how to combine groups into a certain view, specifically, what does the – mean, I understand the check mark but not the -? There are more questions but finally, is there detailed user document or pdf file I can get somewhere. Thanks

  13. moving from Palm Desktop, considered and old design however, I could view my contacts I a spreadsheet type view with columes that could be sorted, moved around, added or subtracted, to the write side a complete view of all contact view was available of the record that was selected on the spreadsheet side. Click the record and window pops up so you can edit record with all a available fields displayed even if they are empty. If you like Palm Desktop 6.2 can be downloaded. Even Aol’s email veiw of email records is much more advanced and flexible then gmail, even though its older design. Google search is world class products, why are these other products are so far behind?

  14. I wish there was a way to sort the contacts by type rather than first name or last name. I like to sort them by type of client that I have and do not want to have to put them in a group and open the group to identify them. I also like to have the option to view the contacts in a business card format.

  15. Great!
    I had been trying to add my customer’s infos by saving the page on favorite! It was easier than I thought!

    Apprecuiate the help!

    Tony Almeida

  16. The list of gmail contacts currently displays: Name, Email, Phone #, Address. Is there a way to display: Name, Email, Company, Phone #, Address?

  17. Hi,

    I imported contacts into gmail but they are in different folders when I want to copy the full list of contacts to a phone.

    Can you help with transfer of contacts between folders.

    Thanks…

  18. How do I delete multiple groups at once. I have literally hundreds of groups with one contact only because I put contacts in outlook (required for work(then export and import to google for the phone. It then creates a group “imported date” for that one contact.
    1/ how do I stop this behaviour and tell it only to create a groups if IT TELL IT TO
    2/ how do I delete the hundreds of “imported” groups at once. – one by one will takae days!!!!

  19. I want to custom order my group list. The only sort option that I have are by either first or last name. I want to order by rank in a business…President, Vice President, etc.

    Is there a way to custom sort the order in the group other than by name?

  20. hello,

    I’m trying to sort my contact on gmail and find it very difficult as I cannot edit contact group from the mails I receive and cannot see the last email in the contact section. is there any way?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *