Merge Duplicate Google Contacts

In Google Contacts, one person may sometimes appear in the “My Contacts” group more than once. This is most likely because you have assigned that person to multiple groups. When you assign a person to a group, that person will show up in the “My Contacts” group. An entry for that person may be added to “My Contacts” for each group you assign them to.

To keep a person from being added to “My Contacts” each time you add them to a group, you can try assigning them to the group from the Cedarville “Directory” group. This may keep another entry from being added to “My Contacts” if that person is already a member.

Duplicate contacts may also appear in "My Contacts" if you import contacts from a .CSV file and one of the contacts in the file is already in your Google Contacts.

To get rid of these duplicate contacts, you can either merge them automatically or manually. You can also use the same following steps to merge contacts in any contact group, not just “My Contacts.”

To Find and Merge Duplicate Contacts Automatically:

1. Navigate to cedarville.edu/google and log in to Google Mail.
2. In the upper-right corner of the screen, click "Mail" > Select "Contacts".
3. From the sidebar, click "Find duplicates."
4. In the upper-right corner of the screen, click [Merge] to merge one set of duplicate contacts or [Merge all] to merge all duplicate contacts. 

Find and Merge Duplicates Manually:

Sometimes Google will not detect all duplicate contacts. When this happens, you will have to merge these duplicate contacts manually. 

1. Navigate to cedarville.edu/google and log in to Google Mail.
2. In the upper-right corner of the screen, click "Mail" > Select "Contacts."
3. From the sidebar, click "Groups" > Choose the group from which you want to find and merge duplicate contacts.
4. Check the box next to all entries of the duplicate contact you wish to merge into one.
5. In the upper-right corner of the screen, click the arrow [Merge] icon. The contacts will merge.

Warning! When you are manually finding and merging duplicate contacts, do not try to merge the entries for more than one person at a time. Simply find all the entries for one person, merge them, and then move on to the next person.