Comments on: My contacts need a fire-proof home.

Question: My contacts need a fire-proof home.

RobertFrost — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 06:39:41 -0800

Anybody know of a worthwhile, online address book?

I am looking for an online address book to be the internet version of my little black book. I know there are many out there, but I haven't been able to find one that suites all of my desires. This is what I want:

1. The ability to apply multiple tags to entries and to view/export entries according to tags (i.e. family, business, friends)
2. The ability to input international address (keepm for example has a "country" field, but only allows for a 5 digit zip code, meaning Japanese addresses - with an 8 digit zip - are a no go)
3. The ability to export into an Excel spreadsheet, or even better directly to Word labels (Christmas card time).
4. If possible, the ability to choose which contacts to export, and which fields to export
5. This may be me dreaming - but some way to keep a tally of how often you have emailed a particular person. I live overseas and travel a lot, so I send a lot of postcards to keep in touch with friends and family. It would be nice to be able to view my address according to how many mailings I've sent them so I can be sure I'm mailing everyone evenly.
6. An interface where data entry is easy (I have an entire book worth of addresses to input).

I thought about just making a spreadsheet on google docs, but there is no way to export them to labels and I do a pretty massive mailing at xmas/new years time that I would prefer to print up labels for (currently I hand write them, it takes ALOT of time).

Thanks for any guidance you might have!

By: chasles

chasles — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 07:39:46 -0800

google contacts seems to be very close to what you need. and its now stand alone from gmail.

By: theichibun

theichibun — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 07:45:43 -0800

Is there any reason why you couldn't use gmail for this?

By: SuperSquirrel

SuperSquirrel — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:23:29 -0800

Well, if you use Google Docs, and then import that into an Excel spreadsheet at card-mailing time, you can use mail merge in Word to create your labels.

By: RobertFrost

RobertFrost — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:31:32 -0800

My reason for not using Google Contacts is that Google Contacts only allows you to input address data as a block (i.e. there aren't different fields for State, City, Country, etc.) and when you export that data, it doesn't result in a very sensible or label friendly spreadsheet. Keepm does have separate fields but is limited in the previously mentioned ways. Google Contacts is still an option but I was hoping there was something a little better out there.

By: Precision

Precision — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:06:34 -0800

I've been looking for the same thing for a while... I'll keep an eye on this thread.

By: dinger

dinger — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:16:17 -0800

An Excel spreadsheet and Dropbox. Done.

By: MesoFilter

MesoFilter — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:19:21 -0800

Highrise. Used for tracking leads, but does most of the other stuff you want too. (caveat: I never really used it)