GREAT WAY TO KEEP YOUR GOOGLE CONTACTS UP-TO-DATE WITH GOOGLE SCRIPT

By Ishant Gupta

Many a times when you take a look at your Google contacts entries, you realize that there is so much matter missing. For instance in some cases residence and mobile phone numbers are missing, or at times mailing addresses, birthdays and anniversary dates of friends and family members are missing.

So the question is how do you complete your Google address book? Well there can be two options. One is you call up each of your friends and family members and get all their details and then enter them in your address book manually. How boring and tiring, isn’t it? But there is another interesting option. Ask them to directly update it themselves. Saves time and energy.

Update Google Contacts- Get your friends to do it.

It’s very simple. First select the contact name whose details are missing. Each selected contact is sent a unique URL which directs the person to a form on the web itself. They can now access the form and fill in the missing data themselves and submit the form on completion. The information is directly updated onto your Google account.

Steps to get started

Create a new group say ‘personal’ in your Google contacts list. Put the contacts of all your close family members and friends in this group. An automatically generated E-mail is sent their inbox which requests them to update their records in Google contacts. Then open the Google script and follow the steps below:

1. Choose File -> Make a Copy to create a copy of the script into your own Google Drive.

2. Update the values of NAME and GROUP variables with the actual values.

3. Go to File -> ManageVersions and save a new version.

4. Go to Publish -> Deploy as Web App, choose “Anyone, even Anonymous” under “Who can access the app” and click the Deploy button.

5. Go to Run -> Initialize to authorize the script. Choose Run -> Initialize to run the script.

[*] If you have trouble accessing the Google script, please download code.zip and copy-paste the content of the three files into script.google.com.

And it’s done in a blink of an eye. So all the people marked personal will receive an E-mail to update their information. Once they put all their information on the web form, you will be notified through an E-mail. The project is created using Google script and the entire source code is available online.

Screenshot A: Your friend gets an email requesting them to update their contact information.

Screenshot B: They can fill the form and their details are added directly into your Google Contacts.

If you want to discontinue with this facility, all you need to do is, open the Google script and un-publish the web app.

You can also add more fields to the web app form like birthdays, anniversaries, company name etc in addition to important details like mailing address, phone numbers, Skype/Fring/Nimbuzz ID etc.