Recently, I mentioned here some problems I was having with Microsoft Outlook, which is what I use for Contacts and Calendar but not for other things like e-mail or Tasks. (I'm a Windows guy, by the way, though I sync both with an iPad and an iPhone. A lot of us Windows guys have iPads and/or iPhones and the Apple folks do a good, subtle job of making us feel like we're aliens operating on their planet.)
I said I'd solved my problems but didn't say how, which has brought much e-mail. This is just for those of you who've had problems with a sync of Outlook screwing up your Contacts list. This is apparently pretty common.
First, what I think caused my problem is that while two of my computers run Windows 7, one is still Windows XP. When the Apple folks decided to get rid of MobileME and push everyone into iCloud, they presented me with a problem of how to sync that XP computer since iCloud doesn't support XP. There's a hack/workaround on the web and I used that…but right after, I began having my sync problem. I'm assuming that was the cause so now that I've fixed my Contacts list, I'm no longer running iCloud on that computer and it will just have to go unsynced until I get around to upgrading it.
Fixing my Contacts list took a bit longer. They'd gotten full of useless, erroneous info…like appending "United States of America" to every address, no matter where the person lives. Somehow also it had a birthdate — usually wrong — listed for most of my Contacts and it kept wanting to add those dates (almost all in 2010) to my Calendar and wouldn't take "no" for an answer. There were other things I had to expunge as well. Outlook is a pain to edit in bulk so here's what I did.
First off, I created a new, empty Contacts list. Then I imported all the various backups I had on my three computers. This pulled in a few old, unwanted Contacts and would have brought a ton of duplicates had I not checked the option to not import dupes. Most did not come in. Then I saved this list and exported it into the format for Microsoft Excel. It was very easy to edit it in Excel and to wipe out the phony birthdates and to clean up the address mess, delete the rest of the dupes and to fix other problems. Then I exported this file. Then I created another new, empty Contacts list in Outlook. Then I imported the file into Outlook and all was well with the world. Or at least it was after I got rid of all the extra, inaccurate Contacts lists and backups I had. I didn't delete them because you never know what you might need later. I stuck them all in a big ZIP archive.
I still wish I had something better than Outlook for my Contacts and Calendar. Last time I asked about this, a lot of you had nominations but I couldn't find one that seemed much better and would sync, as Outlook does, with everything. One of these days…