My Geekdom

Outlook has a nasty habit of getting duplicate, or even sometimes triplicate entries for a contact. While during normal use this can happen, it is not terribly common (especially if you check the "Check for Duplicate Contacts" checkbox in the options window. But, I find it does happen at unusual times such as when synching my treo with Outlook and under unusual circumstances (eg: a new computer, a new treo, treo get's disconnected during synchronization) or when recovering from a disk failure or something.

This problem seems to pop up about every 6-12 months for me. I have over 1000 contacts as I never believe in throwing out an address until I'm certain I will never need it again. Now I'm a PDA user for 18 years and I've migrated my data from PDA to PDA so I've collected quite the collection. Furthermore, long before I ever heard of "tagging" entries, I was adding what I thought of as "keywords" to help me find entries (I have an abysmal memory for names). A typical case could be that one Dr. A, my primary care physician, recommends Dr. B, an orthopedic surgeon to look at my broken toe. So, in Dr. B's contact information (typically in the company name or role), I'll include the string "Dr. A orthopedic orthopedist bones surgeon broken toe". I might also put in a few words Then, if all I can remember is that I want the name of that dude who fixed my broken toe, I'll search for "broken" or "toe" and find the doctor.

The reason I mention this is that, when the contacts get duplicated, they pretty much never copy all those fields. So if I lose my keywords, not only might I not be able to find Dr. B's entry very easily, I might not even recognize who Dr. B is when I stumble upon the entry.

So I need a tool that is going to do some clever deleting and merging. I've looked around and can there are many such tools but they all cost about $30 and I can never justify spending $30 just to help me with a 1-time problem (OK, it is a recurring one-time problem but I always assume that this time is the last time). 

Well today must be my lucky day because I just found, not one, but two free tools. I found them both on Slipstick Systems site (the site is a must for Outlook users - IMO, among the best technical sites anywhere). One of the free tools is ODR5 (Outlook Duplicate Remover 5). A pointer to it can be found here. I must be honest, I don't know exactly where I found the other pointer on Slipstick but the site is here (curious that even Google's "link:http://www.anti-dupe.com" seach didn't help - learn about link: searches).

In any case, I've downloaded both and triend Anti-Dupe (I chose it because "A" comes before "O" and hence I found it first in my download directory). It seems to have worked brilliantly so far. And, with me not being willing to go through my 1000+ contacts by hand, it might be some time before I find out if it messed anything up (eg: next time I search for "toe").