Until these changes, announced yesterday, Gmail Contacts was quite limited in the number of fields that it supported. It didn’t have fields for “web site” or “birthday,” for example, both of which are commonly used in other email clients and contact managers. This meant that if you imported contacts from another program, Gmail would have to use the all-encompassing  “notes” field for that extra information. That wasn’t ideal if you did a one-way import, but was especially problematic if you were trying to sync data between Gmail Contacts and another program or device that did support those extra fields. These new fields, as well as being useful in their own right, should make syncing much easier. Unfortunately, if you’ve already imported all your contacts and want to use these fields, you’ll need to wipe your Gmail Contacts and re-import them.

The additional fields have been available in standalone Google Contacts for over a month; it’s surprising that it’s taken this long to roll out these changes to Gmail Contacts, too.

Do you use Gmail Contacts as your primary contact manager?

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