Setting Up Your Contacts | Google Power Tools Bible

The quick way to add contacts to your Gmail contact list is by importing them from another program. Importing contacts is covered in the “Switching to Gmail” section earlier in this chapter. You can add contacts individually by clicking the Contacts link located on the left side of the page. In the text box that appears, type the e-mail address of your new contact. This launches the contact management form.

Creating a new contact

Click the Create Contact link at the top of the form to create a new contact. Fill in the name of the contact, the primary e-mail address, and any notes you want to keep about this person. You can also specify a photo for this person or choose to view a photo of his or her choosing. When you specify a photo, you need to locate it on your hard drive and upload it to the Google server. If the photo is too large, a cropping window appears above the photo. You can choose to crop this image by moving the cropping window to the area of the photo you want to display or by choosing to discard this photo and selecting another, smaller image.

To include additional contact information, such as the person’s address and telephone number, click the add more contact info link when adding a new contact. This link appears below the person’s optional display photo. Clicking this link expands the contact information.

Managing fields and sections

You can create your own contact format by choosing the information you want to add in each field. Select a label from the drop-down list. The field labels include:

Email: Adds a secondary e-mail address. The primary e-mail address was already entered.
IM: Include an instant messenger contact name.
Phone: Telephone number.
Mobile: Mobile or cell phone number.
Pager: Do people still use these?
Fax: It won’t be long until these are a thing of the past.
Company: Name of the company in which the contact is employed.
Title: The contact’s title within the company.
Other: Add custom information.

To add additional fields, click the add another field link. A new field is inserted into your contact form. Select a label for the new field by choosing one from the drop-down list.

Tip

Once you add a field it cannot be removed. You will need to remove the section (see the following) and add the fields back.

The default sections are Personal and Work. You can choose to rename these sections simply by overwriting the current section names, or you can add new sections by clicking the add section link at the bottom of the contact form. The default name for the new section is Other. You can choose to keep that section title or change it by overwriting it (highlighting the word and typing over it). You can add additional fields to each new section you add.

Remove sections by simply clicking the remove section link in the corresponding section.

Contact management

The Contact form has three tabs, Frequently Mailed, All Contacts and Groups. The Frequently mailed tab contains a list of the people you have mailed regularly. The list contains the name of the person, their email address and a selection allowing you to manage whether each contact appears in your Quick Contacts list in the left pane of the Gmail window. The selections include: Always, Auto, Never and Block.

Import contacts into the Contact management by clicking the Import link in the upper-right portion of the Contact management tab. You can also export your contacts stored in Gmail for use in other contact management programs. Simply click the Export link and choose between Gmail CSV and Outlook CSV file formats, then click Export Contacts.

The All Contacts tab is similar to the list of contacts in the Frequently Mailed tab except that it contains a list of anyone you have either sent email to, or received email from using Gmail. It is a good idea to clean this out once in a while as it may contain contacts from people you meant to email only a single time. To create a new contact in this list, click the Create Contact link at the top of the page. Organize your contacts into groups by selecting the contacts you want to organize and selecting a group from the drop down list at the top of the page.

You can enter additional information for each contact, such as their phone number and address. To enter this information, follow these steps:

Log in to your Gmail account.
Click Contacts on the left side of the page.
Click the contact you want to edit.
Click edit contact information.
Type the information in each field.
Click Save.

Manage your groups by clicking the Groups tab. There you will see a list of your groups by group name. The details column of the list tells you how many people are in each group, and lists the names of the people in the group. Create new groups by clicking the Create Group link.