You have several incomplete entries in your Google Contacts. Some entries are missing phone numbers, others don’t have any mailing address associated with them while in the case of close friends and family members, you don’t even have a record of their birthdays. →
How do you get this missing information from contacts and complete your address book?
You can always send them an email or make a phone call and fill-in the missing details manually or there’s a new and better alternative – you can ask your contacts to directly update their own records in your Google Contacts.
Ask Friends to Update your Google Contacts
It works something like this. Your selected contacts are sent a unique URL that points to a web form. They can fill-in the missing data, press the Submit button and all that information is directly added to your Google Contacts. Simple.
To get started, go to your Google Contacts and create a new group (let’s call it Personal). Now put one or more contacts into this new group – all these group members will get an automatic email from you requesting them to update their own records in Google Contacts.
Next open this Google Script and follow these steps:
- Choose File -> Make a Copy to create a copy of the script into your own Google Drive.
- Update the values of NAME and GROUP variables with the actual values.
- Go to File -> Manage Versions and Save a new version.
- Go to Publish -> Deploy as Web App, choose “Anyone, even Anonymous” under “Who can access the app” and click the Deploy button.
- Go to Run -> Initialize to authorize the script. Choose Run -> Initialize to run the script.
That’s it. All your contacts who are part of that particular Google Contacts group will now receive an email from you (screenshot A). When any of these contacts update their details through the form (screenshot B), you will be notified of the change via email.
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.
The project is created using Google Scripts and the entire source code is available online. If you ever wish to disable the Google Contacts form, open the same Google Script in your Google Drive and unpublish the web app (under Publish -> Deploy as web app).
Also, this version of the project request essential contact details like Mailing Address, Mobile Number, Skype ID, etc. but you can easily extend the script /web form to include additional fields like Anniversary date, Company name and so on.
This story, Keep your Google Contacts Up to Date!, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 26/12/2012 under Google Contacts, Internet.
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